A Problem in Modern Ethics Copyright © 1997 by Rictor Norton. All rights reserved. This edition may not be reproduced or redistributed to third parties without permission of the author. [Privately printed in a limited edition of fifty copies in 1891, surreptitiously reprinted in an edition limited to 100 copies in 1896, from which the following excerpts are taken; numerous typographical errors have been corrected. In the Note which concludes section V, Symonds translates a letter from "a man of high position in London" sent to Krafft-Ebing, protesting against theories of morbidity, which Krafft-Ebing published in German in Psychopathia Sexualis (1889); the author of this document was probably none other than Symonds himself. The following is an abridged edition, with omissions noted by ellipses.] Introduction There is a passion, or a perversion of appetite, which, like all human passions, has played a considerable part in the world's history for good or evil; but which has hardly yet received the philosophical attention and the scientific investigation it deserves. The reason of this may be that in all Christian societies the passion under consideration has been condemned to pariahdom: consequently, philosophy and science have not deigned to make it the subject of special enquiry. Only one great race in past ages, the Greek race, to whom we owe the inheritance of our ideas, succeeded in raising it to the level of chivalrous enthusiasm. Nevertheless, we find it present everywhere and in all periods of history. We cannot take up the religious books, the legal codes, the annals, the descriptions of the manners of any nation, whether large or small, powerful or feeble, civilized or savage, without meeting with this passion in one form or other. Sometimes it assumes the calm and dignified attitude of conscious merit, as in Sparta, Athens, thebes. sometimes it skulks in holes and corners, hiding an abashed head and shrinking from the light of day, as in the capitals of modern Europe. It confronts us on the steppes of Asia, where hordes of nomads drink the milk of mares; in the bivouac of Celtic warriors, lying wrapped in wolves' skins round their camp-fires; upon the sands of Arabia, where the Bedouin raise desert dust in flying squadrons. We discern it among the palm-groves of the South Sea Islands, in the card-houses and temple-gardens of Japan, under Eskimo snow-huts, beneath the sultry vegetation of Peru, beside the streams of Shiraz and the waters of the Ganges, in the cold clear air of Scandinavian winters. It throbs in our huge cities. The pulse of it can be felt in London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, no less than in Constantinople, Naples, Teheran, and Moscow. It finds a home in Alpine valleys, Albanian ravines, Californian canyons, and gorges of Caucasian mountains. It once sat, clothed in Imperial purple, on the throne of the Roman Caesars, crowned with the tiara on the chair of St Peter. It has flaunted, emblazoned with the heraldries of France and England, in coronation ceremonies at Rheims and Westminster. The royal palaces of Madrid and Aranjuez tell their tales of it. So do the ruined courtyards of Granada and the castle-keep of Avignon. It shone with clear radiance in the gymnasium of Hellas, and nerved the dying heroes of Greek freedom for their last forlorn hope upon the plains of Chaeronea. Endowed with inextinguishable life, in spite of all that has been done to suppress it, this passion survives at large in modern states and towns, penetrates society, makes itself felt in every quarter of the globe where men are brought into communion with men. Yet no one dares to speak of it; or if they do, they bate their breath, and preface their remarks with maledictions. Those who read these lines will hardly doubt what passion it is that I am hinting at. Quod semper ubique et ab omnibus — surely it deserves a name. Yet I can hardly find a name which will not seem to soil this paper. The accomplished languages of Europe in the nineteenth century supply no term for this persistent feature of human psychology, without importing some implication of disgust, disgrace, vituperation. Science, however, has recently — within the last twenty years in fact — invented a convenient phrase, which does not prejudice the matter under consideration. She speaks of the "inverted sexual instinct"; and with this neutral nomenclature the investigator has good reason to be satisfied. Inverted sexuality, the sexual instinct diverted from its normal channel, directed (in the case of males) to males, forms the topic of the following discourse. The study will be confined to modern times, and to those nations which regard the phenomenon with religious detestation. This renders the enquiry peculiarly difficult, and exposes the enquirer, unless he be a professed expert in diseases of the mind and nervous centres, to almost certain misconstruction. Still, there is no valid reason why the task of statement and analysis should not be undertaken. Indeed one might rather wonder why candid and curious observers of humanity have not attempted to fathom a problem which faces them at every turn in their historical researches and in daily life. Doubtless their neglect is due to natural or acquired repugnance, to feelings of disgust and hatred, derived from immemorial tradition, and destructive of the sympathies which animate a really zealous pioneer. Nevertheless, what is human is alien to no human being. What the law punishes, but what, in spite of law, persists and energizes, ought to arrest attention. We are all of us reasonable to some extent for the maintenance and enforcement of our laws. We are all of us, as evolutionary science surely teaches, interested in the facts of anthropology, however repellant some of these may be to our own feelings. We cannot evade the conditions of atavism and heredity. Every family runs the risk of producing a boy or a girl, whose life will be embittered by inverted sexuality, but who in all other respects will be no worse or better than the normal members of the home. Surely, then, it is our duty and our interest to learn what we can about its nature, and to arrive through comprehension at some rational method of dealing with it. I Christian Opinion Since this enquiry is limited to actual conditions of contemporary life, we need not discuss the various ways in which the phenomenon of sexual inversion has been practically treated by races with whose habits and religions we have no affinity. On the other hand, it is of the highest importance to obtain a correct conception of the steps whereby the Christian nations, separating themselves from ancien paganism, introduced a new and stringent morality into their opinion on this topic, and enforced their ethical views by legal prohibitions of a very formidable kind. Without prejudicing or prejudicing this new morality, now almost universally regarded as a great advance upon the ethics of the earlier pagan world, we must observe that it arose when science was nonexistent, when the study of humanity had not emerged from the cradle, and when theology was in the ascendant. We have therefore to expect from it no delicate distinctions, no anthropological investigations, no psychological analysis, and no spirit of toleration. It simply decreed that what had hitherto been viewed as immorality at worst should henceforth be classed among crimes against God, nature, humanity, the state. Opening the Bible, we find severe penalties attached to sexual inversion by the Mosaic law, in the interests of population and in harmony with the Jewish theory of abominations. The lesson is driven home by the legend of two cities, Sodom and Gomorrah, overwhelmed with fire because of their addiction to abnormal sexual indulgences. Here the vindices flammae of the Roman code appear for the first time — the stake and the flames, which medieval legislation appointed for offenders of this sort. St Paul, penetrated with Hebrew ethics, denounced the corruption of the Gentiles in these words: "For this cause God gave them up into vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet." Christ uttered no opinion upon what we now call sexual inversion. Neither light nor leading comes from Him, except such as may be indirectly derived from his treatment of the woman taken in adultery. When the Empire adopted Christianity, it had therefore the traditions of the Mosaic law and the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans to guide its legislators on this topic. The Emperors felt obscurely that the main pulses of human energy were slackening; population tended to dwindle; the territory of the empire shrank slowly year by year before their eyes. As the depositories of a higher religion and a nobler morality, they felt it their duty to stamp out pagan customs, and to unfurl the banner of social purity. The corruption of the Roman cities had become abominable. The laziness and cowardice of Roman citizens threatened the commonwealth with ruin. To repress sexual appetites was not the ruler's object. It was only too apparent that these natural desires no longer prompted the people to sufficient procreation or fertility. The brood begotten upon Roman soil was inadequate to cope with the inrushing tide of barbarians. Wisdom lay in attempting to rehabilitate marriage, the family domestic life. Meanwhile a certain vice ran riot through society, a vice for which Jehovah had rained fire and brimstone upon Sodom, a vice which the Mosaic code punished with death, a vice threatened by St Paul with "that recompense of their error which was meet". Justinian, in 538 AD, seems to have been terrified by famines, earthquakes and pestilences. He saw, or professed to see, in these visitations the avenging hand of Jehovah, the "recompense which was meet" mysteriously prophesied by St Paul. Thereupon he fulminated his edict against unnatural sinners, whereby they were condemned to torments and the supreme penalty of death. . . . Before Justinian, both Constantine and Theodosius passed laws against sexual inversion, committing the offenders to "avenging flames". But these statutes were not rigidly enforced, and modern opinion on the subject may be said to flow from Justinian's legislation. Opinion, in matters of custom and manners, always follows law. Though Imperial edicts could not eradicate a passion which is inherent inhuman nature, they had the effect of stereotyping extreme punishments in all the codes of Christian nations, and of creating a permanent social antipathy. II Vulgar Errors Gibbon's remarks upon the legislation of Constantine, Theodosius, and Justinian supply a fair example of the way in which men of learning and open mind have hitherto regarded what, after all, is a phenomenon worthy of cold and calm consideration. "I touch", he says, "with reluctance, and despatch with impatience, a more odious vice, of which modesty rejects the name, and nature abominates the idea." After briefly alluding to the morals of Etruria, Greece, and Rome, he proceeds to the enactments of Constantine: "Adultery was first declared to be a capital offence. . . . the same penalties were inflicted on the passive and active guilt of paederasty; and all criminals, of free or servile condition, were either drowned, or beheaded, or cast alive into the avenging flames" (Vindices Flammae). Then, without further comment, he observes: "The adulterers were spared by the common sympathy of mankind; but the lovers of their own sex were pursued by general and pious indignation." "Justinian relaxed the punishment at least of female infidelity: the guilty spouse was only condemned to solitude and penance, and at the end of two years she might be recalled to the arms of a forgiving husband. But the same Emperor declared himself the implacable enemy of unmanly lust, and the cruelty of his persecution can scarcely be excused by the purity of his motives. In defiance of every principle of justice he stretched to past as well as future offences the operations of his edicts, with the previous allowance of a short respite for confession and pardon. A painful death was inflicted by the amputation of the sinful instrument, or the insertion of sharp reeds into the pores and tubes of most exquisite sensibility." One consequence of such legislation may be easily foreseen. "A sentence of death and infamy was often founded on the slight and suspicious evidence of a child or a servant: the guilt of the green faction, or the rich, and of the enemies of Theodora, was presumed by the judges, and paederasty became the crime of those to whom no crime could be imputed." This state of things has prevailed wherever the edicts of Justinian have been adopted into the laws of nations. The Cathari, the Paterinni, the heretics of Provence, the Templars, the Fratricelli were all accused of unnatural crimes, tortured into confession, and put to death. Where nothing else could be adduced against an unpopular sect, a political antagonist, a wealthy corporation, a rival in literature, a powerful party leader, unnatural crime was insinuated, and a cry of "Down with the pests of society" prepared the populace for a crusade. It is the common belief that all subjects of sexual inversion have originally loved women, but that, through monstrous debauchery and superfluity of naughtiness, tiring of normal pleasure, they have wilfully turned their appetites into other channels. This is true about a certain number. But the sequel of this Essay will prove that it does not meet by far the larger proportion of cases, in whom such instincts are inborn, and a considerable percentage in whom they are also inconvertible. Medical jurists and physicians have recently agreed to accept this as a fact. It is the common belief that a male who loves his own sex must be despicable, degraded, depraved, vicious, and incapable of humane or generous sentiments. If Greek history did not contradict this supposition, a little patient enquiry into contemporary manners would suffice to remove it. But people will not take this trouble about a matter, which, like Gibbon, they "touch with reluctance and despatch with impatience". Those who are obliged to do so find to their surprise that "among the men who are subject to this deplorable vice there are even quite intelligent, talented, and highly-placed persons, of excellent and even noble character" (Stieber, Practisches Lehrbuch der Criminal- Polizei, 1860, cap. 19, quoted by Ulrichs, Araxes, p. 9). The vulgar expect to discover the objects of their outraged animosity in the scum of humanity. but these may be met with every day in drawing- rooms, law-courts, banks, universities, mess-rooms; on the bench, the throne, the chair of the professor; under the blouse of the workman, the cassock of the priest, the epaulettes of the officer, the smock-frock of the ploughman, the wig of the barrister, the mantle of the peer, the costume of the actor, the tights of the athlete, the gown of the academician. It is the common belief that one, and only one, unmentionable act is what the lovers seek as the source of their unnatural gratification, and that this produces spinal disease, epilepsy, consumption, dropsy, and the like. Nothing can be more mistaken, as the scientifically reported cases of avowed and adult sinners amply demonstrate. Neither do they invariably or even usually prefer the aversa Venus; nor, when this happens, do they exhibit peculiar signs of suffering in health. Excess in any venereal pleasure will produce diseases of nervous exhaustion and imperfect nutrition. But the indulgence of inverted sexual instincts within due limits, cannot be proved to be especially pernicious. Were it so, the Dorians and Athenians, including Sophocles, Pindar, Aeschines, Epaminondas, all the Spartan kings and generals, the Theban legion, Pheidias, Plato, would have been one nation of ricketty, phthisical, dropsical paralytics. The grain of truth contained in this vulgar error is that, under the prevalent laws and hostilities of modern society, the inverted passion has to be indulged furtively, spasmodically, hysterically; that the repression of it through fear and shame frequently leads to habits of self-abuse; and that its unconquerable solicitations sometimes convert it from a healthy outlet of the sexual nature into a morbid monomania. It is also true that professional male prostitutes, like their female counterparts, suffer from local and constitutional disorders, as is only natural. It is the common belief that boys under age are specially liable to corruption. This error need not be confuted here. Anyone who chooses to read the cases recorded by Casper-Liman, Casper in his Novellen, Krafft-Ebing, and Ulrichs, or to follow the developments of the present treatise, or to watch the manners of London after dark, will be convicted of its absurdity. Young boys are less exposed to dangers from abnormal than young girls from normal voluptuaries. It is the common belief that all subjects from inverted instinct carry their lusts written in their faces; that they are pale, languid, scented, effeminate, painted, timid, oblique in expression. This vulgar error rests upon imperfect observation. A certain class of such people are undoubtedly feminine. From their earliest youth they have shown marked inclination for the habits and the dress of women; and when they are adult, they do everything in their power to obliterate their manhood. It is equally true that such unsexed males possess a strong attraction for some abnormal individuals. But it is a gross mistake to suppose that all the tribe betray these attributes. The majority differ in no detail of their outward appearance, their physique, or their dress, from normal men. They are athletic, masculine in habits, frank in manner, passing through society year after year without arousing a suspicion of their inner temperament. Were it not so, society would long ago have had its eyes opened to the amount of perverted sexuality it harbours. The upshot of this discourse on vulgar errors is that popular opinion is made up of a number of contradictory misconceptions and confusions. Moreover, it has been taken fro granted that "to investigate the depraved instincts of humanity is unprofitable and disgusting". Consequently the subject has been imperfectly studied; and individuals belonging to radically different species are confounded in one vague sentiment of reprobation. Assuming that they are all abominable, society is contented to punish them indiscriminately. The depraved debauchee who abuses boys received the same treatment as the young man who loves a comrade. The male prostitute who earns his money by extortion is scarcely more condemned than a man of birth and breeding who has been seen walking with soldiers. III Literature — Descriptive Sexual inversion can boast a voluminous modern literature, little known to general readers. A considerable part of this is pornographic, and need not arrest our attention. [Footnote: Ancient literature abounds in prose and poetry which are both of them concerned with homosexual love. Only a portion of this can be called pornographic: among the Greeks, the Mousa Paidika, parts of Lucian, and occasional hints in Athenaeus and Aristophanes perhaps deserve the name; among the Romans, the Priapeia, the Satyricon of Petronius, some elegies and satires, certainly do so. Italian literature can show the Rime Burlesche, Beccadelli's Hermaphroditus, the Canti Carnascialeschi, the maccaronic poems of Fidentius, and the remarkably outspoken romance entitled Alcibiade fanciullo a scola. Balzac has treated the theme, but with reserve and delicacy. Mirabeau's Erotika Biblion is a kind of classic on the subject. In English literature, if we except Shakespeare's Sonnets, George [sic: actually Richard] Barnfield's Poems, parts of Marlowe, Roderick Random, Churchill's Satire The Times, homosexual passions have been rarely handled, and none of these works are pornographic. In Germany, Count von Platen, Heine's victim, was certainly an Urning; but his homosexual imitations of Persian poetry are pure, though passionate. I am not acquainted with more than the titles of some distinctly pornographic German books. The following appears to be of this sort: Mannesliebe, oder drei Jahre aus dem Leben eines jungen Mannes.] A good deal is descriptive, scientific, historical, anthropological, apologetical, and polemical. With a few books in each of these kinds I propose to deal now. The first which falls under my hand is written by a French official, who was formerly chief of the Police Department for Morals in Paris (Les Deux Prostitutions, par F. Carlier, Ancient Chef du Service actif des Moeurs à la Préfecture de Police. Paris, Dentu, 1889). M Carlier, during ten years, had excellent opportunities for studying the habits of professional male prostitutes and their frequenters. He has condensed the results of his experience in seven very disagreeable chapters, which offer a revolting picture of vice and systematized extortion in a great metropolis. . . . M Carlier regards the subject wholly from the point of view of prostitution. He has proved abundantly that male prostitution is organized in Paris upon the same system as its female counterpart, and he has demonstrated that this system is attended with the same dangers to society. A violent animus against antiphysical passions makes him exaggerate these dangers, for it is clear that normal vice is no less free from sordid demoralization and crimes of violence that its abnormal twin brother. Both are fornication; and everywhere, in Corinth as in Sodom, the prostitutes goes hand in hand with the bully, the robber, and the cut-throat. . . . M Carlier proceeds to describe the two main classes, which in France are known as tantes and amateurs. The former are subdivided into minor branches, under the names of jésus, petits jésus, corvettes (naval), soldiers. The latter, called also rivettes, are distinguished by their tastes for different sorts of tantes. Those who are interested in such matters may turn to M Carlier's pages for minute information regarding the habits, coteries, houses of debauch, bullies, earnings, methods of extortion, dwellings, balls, banquets, and even wedding-parties of these people. A peculiar world of clandestine vice in a great city is revealed; and the authentic documents, abundantly presented, render the picture vivid in its details. From the official papers which passed through M Carlier's bureau during ten years (1860—70), he compiled a list of 6342 paederasts who came within the cognizance of the police: 2049 Parisians, 3709 provincials, 484 foreigners. Of these 3532, or more than half, could not be convicted of illegal acts. . . . In conclusion, M Carlier, though he so strongly deplores the impunity extended by French law to sexual inversion, admits that this has not augmented the evil. Speaking about England, where legal penalties are heavy enough, he says: "Though they call it the nameless crime there, it has in England at least as many votaries as in France, and they are quite as depraved." IV Literature — Medico-Forensic Carlier's book deals with the external aspects of inverted sexuality, as this exists in Paris under the special form of prostitution. The author professes to know nothing more about the subject than what came beneath his notice in the daily practice of his trade as a policeman. He writes with excusable animosity. We see at once that he is neither a philosopher by nature, nor a man of science, but only a citizen, endowed with the normal citizen's antipathy for passions alien to his own. Placed at the head of the Bureau of Morals, Carlier was brought into collision with a tribe of people whom he could not legally arrest,but whom he cordially hated. They were patently vicious; and (what was peculiarly odious to the normal man) these degraded beings were all males. He saw that the public intolerance of "antiphysical passions", which he warmly shared, encouraged an organized system of chantage [blackmail]. Without entertaining the question whether public opinion might be modified, he denounced the noxious gang as pests of society. The fact that England, with her legal prohibitions, suffered to the same extent as France from the curse of "paederasty", did not make him pause. Consequently, the light which he has thrown upon the subject of this treatise only illuminates the dark dens of male vice in a big city. He leaves us where we were about the psychological and ethical problem. He shows what deep roots the passion strikes in the centres of modern civilization, and how it thrives under conditions at once painful to its victims and embarrassing to an agent of police. Writers on forensic medicine take the next place in the row of literary witnesses. It is not their business to investigate the psychological condition of persons submitted to the action of the laws. They are concerned with the law itself, and with those physical circumstances which may bring the accused within its operation, or may dismiss him free from punishment. Yet their function, by importing the quality of the physician into the sphere of jurisprudence, renders them more apprehensive of the underlying problem than a mere agent of police. We expect impartial scientific scrutiny in such authorities, and to some extent we find it. The leading writers on forensic medicine at the present time in Europe are Casper (edited by Liman) for Germany, Tardieu for France, and Taylor for England. Taylor is so reticent upon the subject of unnatural crime that his handbook on The Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence does not demand minute examination. It may, however, be remarked that he believes false accusations to be even commoner in this matter than in the case of rape, since they are only too frequently made the means of blackmailing. For this reason he leaves the investigation of such crimes to the lawyers. Both Casper and Tardieu discuss the topic of sexual inversion with antipathy. But there are notable points of difference in the method and in the conclusions of the two authors. Tardieu, perhaps because he is a Frenchman, educated in the school of Paris, which we have learned to know from Carlier, assumes that all subjects of the passion are criminal or vicious. He draws no psychological distinction between paederast and paederast. He finds no other name for them, and looks upon the whole class as voluntarily degraded beings, who, for the gratification of monstrous desires, have unsexed themselves. A large part of his work is devoted to describing what he believes to be the signs of active and passive immorality in the bodies of persons addicted to these habits (A. Tardieu, Attentats aux Moeurs (Paris: Dentu, 1889), pp. 213—55). Casper and Liman approach the subject with almost equal disgust, but with more regard for scientific truth than Tardieu. They point out that the term paederast is wholly inadequate to describe the several classes of male persons afflicted with sexual inversion. They clearly expect, in course of time, a general mitigation of the penalties in force against such individuals. According to them, the penal laws of North Germany, on the occasion of their last revision, would probably have been altered, had not the jurists felt that the popular belief in the criminality of paederasts ought to be considered (J. L. Casper and Carl Liman, Handbuch der Gerichtlichen Medicin (Berlin: Hirschwald, 1889), vol. I, p. 164). Consequently, a large number of irresponsible persons, in the opinion of experts like Casper and Liman, are still exposed to punishments by laws enacted under the influence of vulgar errors. These writers are not concerned with the framing of codes, nor again with the psychological diagnosis of accused persons. It is their business to lay down rules whereby a medical authority, consulted in a doubtful case, may form his own view as to the guilt or innocence of the accused. Their attention is therefore mainly directed to the detection of signs upon the bodies of incriminated individuals. This question of physical diagnosis leads them into a severe critique of Tardieu. Their polemic attacks each of the points which he attempted to establish. I must content myself by referring to the passage of their work which deals with this important topic (Ibid., pp. 174—81). Suffice it here to say that they reject all signs as worse than doubtful, except a certain deformation of one part of the body, which may possibly be taken as the proof of habitual prostitution, when it occurs in quite young persons. Of course they admit that wounds, violent abrasions of the skin, in certain places, and some syphilitic affections strongly favour the presumption of a criminal act. Finally, after insisting on the insecurity of Tardieu's alleged signs, and pointing out the responsibility assumed by physicians who base a judgment on them, the two Germans sum up their conclusions in the following words (p. 178): "It is extremely remarkable that while Tardieu mentions 206 cases, and communicates a select list of 19, which appear to him to exhibit these peculiar conformations of the organs, he can only produce one single instance where the formation seemed indubitable. Let any one peruse his 19 cases, and he will be horrified at the unhesitating condemnations pronounced by Tardieu." The two notes of exclamation which close this sentence in the original are fully justified. It is indeed horrifying to think that a person, implicated in some foul accusation, may have his doom fixed by a doctrinaire like Tardieu. Antipathy and ignorance in judges and the public, combined with erroneous canons of evidence in the expert, cannot fail to lead in such cases to some serious miscarriage of justice. Passing from the problem of diagnosis and the polemic against Tardieu, it must be remarked that Casper was the first writer of this class to lay down the distinction between inborn and acquired perversion of the sexual instinct. The law does not recognize this distinction. If a criminal act be proved, the psychological condition of the agent is legally indifferent — unless it can be shown that he was clearly mad and irresponsible, in which case he may be consigned to a lunatic asylum instead of the jail. But Casper and Liman, having studied the question of sexual maladies in general, and given due weight to the works of Ulrichs, call attention to the broad differences which exist between persons in whom abnormal appetites are innate and those in whom they are acquired. . . . Medico-juristic science made a considerable step when Casper adopted this distinction of two types of sexual inversion. But, as is always the case in the analysis of hitherto neglected phenomena, his classification falls far short of the necessities of the problem. While treating of acquired sexual inversion, he only thinks of debauchees. He does not seem to have considered a deeper question — deeper in its bearing upon the way in which society will have to deal with the whole problem — the question of how far these instincts are capable of being communicated by contagious to persons in their fullest exercise of sexual vigour. Taste, fashion, preference, as factors in the dissemination of anomalous passions, he has left out of his account. It is also, but this is a minor matter, singular that he should have restricted his observations on the freemasonry among paederasts to those in whom the instinct is acquired. That exists quite as much or even more among those in whom it is congenital. The upshot of the whole matter, however, is that the best book on medical jurisprudence now extant repudiates the enormities of Tardieu's method, and lays it down for proved that "the majority of persons who are subject" to sexual inversion come into the world, or issue from the cradle, with their inclination clearly marked. V Literature — Medicine Medical writers upon this subject are comparatively numerous in French and German literature, and they have been multiplying rapidly of late years. The phenomenon of sexual inversion is usually regarded in these books from the point of view of psychopathic or neuropathic derangement, inherited from morbid ancestors, and developed in the patient by early habits of self- abuse. What is the exact distinction between "psychopathic" and "neuropathic" I do not know. The former term seems intelligible in the theologian's mouth, the latter in the physician's. But I cannot understand both being used together to indicate different kinds of pathological diathesis. What is the soul, what are the nerves? We have probably to take the two terms as indicating two was of considering the same phenomenon; the one subjective, the other objective; "psychopathic" pointing to the derangement as observed in the mind emotions of its subject; "neuropathic" to the derangement as observed in anomalies of the nervous system. It would be impossible, in an essay of this kind, to review the whole mass of medical observation, inference, and speculation which we have at our command. Nor is a layman, perhaps, well qualified for the task of criticism and comparison in a matter of delicacy where doctors differ as to details. I shall therefore content myself with giving an account of four of the most recent, most authoritative, and, as it seems to me, upon the whole most sensible studies. Moreau, Tarnowsky, Krafft-Ebing, and Lombroso take very nearly similar views of the phenomenon; and between them they are gradually forming a theory which is likely to become widely accepted. Des Aberrations du Sens Génésique, par le Dr. Paul Moreau, 4th edition, 1887 Moreau starts with the proposition that there is a sixth sense, "le sens génital", which, like other sense, can be injured psychically and physically without the mental functions, whether affective or intellectual, suffering thereby. His book is therefore a treatise on the diseases of the sexual sense. These diseases are by no means of recent origin, he says. They have always and everywhere existed. He begins with a historical survey, which, so far as antiquity is concerned, is very defective. Having quoted with approval [a single] passage about Greek society . . . [by] Dr Descuret, Moreau leaves Greece alone, and goes on to Rome. The state of morals in Rome under the empire he describes as "une dépravation maladive, devenue par la force des choses héréditaire, endémique, épidémique." Then follows a short account of the emperors and their female relatives. . . . Then he passes to the middle ages, and dwells upon the popular belief in incubi and succubi. It is curious to find him placing Leo X, Fran‡ois I, Henri IV, Louis XIV, among the neuropathics. When it comes to this, everybody with strong sexual instincts, and the opportunity of indulging them, is a nervous invalid. Modern times are illustrated by the debaucheries of the Regency, the reign of Louis XV, Russian ladies, the Marquis de Sade. The House of Orleans seems in truth to have been tainted with hereditary impudicity of a morbid kind. But if it was so at the end of the last century, it has since the Revolution remarkably recovered health — by what miracle? Moreau now formulates the thesis he wishes to prove: "L'aberration pathologique des sentiments géniques doit ˆtre assimilée complètement … une névrose, et, comme telle, son existence est compatible avec les plus hautes intelligences." He discovers hereditary taint universally present in these cases. "Hérédité directe, hérédité indirecte, hérédité transformée, se trouve chez les génésiaques." Passing to aetiology, he rests mainly upon an organism predisposed by ancestry, and placed in a milieu favourable to its morbid development. Provocative causes are not sufficient to awake the aberration in healthy organisms, but the least thing will set a predisposed organism on the track. This, I may observe, seems to preclude simple imitation, upon which Moreau afterwards lays considerable stress; for if none but the already tainted can be influenced by their milieu, none but the tainted will imitate. . . . It is not necessary to follow Moreau in his otherwise interesting account of the various manifestations of sexual disease. The greater part of these have no relation to the subject of my work. But what he says in passing about "paederasts, sodomites, saphists', has to be resumed. He reckons them among "A class of individuals who cannot and ought not to be confounded either with men enjoying the fullness of their intellectual faculties, or yet with madmen properly so called. They form an intermediate class, a mixed class, constituting a real link of union between reason and madness, the nature and existence of which can most frequently be explained only by one word: Heredity." It is surprising, after this announcement, to discover that what he has to say about sexual inversion is limited to Europe and its moral system, "having nothing to do with the morals of other countries where paederasty is accepted and admitted." Literally, then, he regards sexual inversion in modern Christian Europe as a form of hereditary neuropathy, a link between reason and madness; but in ancient Greece, in modern Persia and Turkey, he regards the same psychological anomaly from the point of view, not of disease, but of custom. In other words, an Englishman or a Frenchman who loves the male sex must be diagnosed as tainted with disease; while Sophocles, Pindar, Pheidias, Epaminondas, Plato are credited with yielding to an instinct which was healthy in their times because society accepted it. The inefficiency of this distinction in a treatise of analytical science ought to be indicated. The bare fact that ancient Greece tolerated, and that modern Europe refuses to tolerate sexual inversion, can have nothing to do with the aetiology, the pathology, the psychological definition of the phenomenon in its essence. What has to be faced is that a certain type of passion flourished under the light of day and bore good fruits for society in Hellas; that the same type of passion flourishes in the shade and is the source of misery and shame in Europe. The passion has not altered; but the way of regarding it morally and legally is changed. A scientific investigator ought not to take changes of public opinion into account when he is analysing a psychological peculiarity. . . . How little Dr Moreau has weighed the importance of ancient Greece in his discussion of this topic, appears from the omission of all facts supplied by Greet literature and history in the introduction to his Essay. He dilates upon the legends recorded by the Roman Emperors, because these seem to support his theory of hereditary malady. He uses Juvenal, Tacitus, Suetonius, and the Augustan Histories to support his position, although they form part of the annals of a people among whom "paederasty was accepted and admitted". He ignores the biographies of the Spartan kings, the institutions of Crete, the Theban Sacred Band, the dialogues of Plato, the anecdotes related about Pheidias, Sophocles, Pindar, Demosthenes, Alcibiades, and so forth. Does he perhaps do so because they cannot in any way be made to square with his theory of morbidity? The truth is that ancient Greece offers insuperable difficulties to theorists who treat sexual inversion exclusively from the points of view of neuropathy, tainted heredity, and masturbation. And how incompetent Dr Moreau is to deal with Greek matters may be seen in the grotesque synonym he has invented for paederasty — philopodie. Properly the word is compounded of philein and pous; but I suppose it is meant to suggest philein and podex. . . . As the final result of [his] analysis, Moreau classifies sexual inversion with erotomania, nymphomania, satyriasis, bestiality, rape, profanation of corpses, etc., as the symptom of a grave lesion of the procreative sense. He seeks to save its victims from the prison by delivering them over to the asylum. His moral sentiments are so revolted that he does not even entertain the question whether their instincts are natural and healthy though abnormal. Lastly, he refuses to face the aspects of this psychological anomaly which are forced upon the student of ancient Hellas. He does not even take into account the fact, patent to experienced observers, that simple folk not unfrequently display no greater disgust for the abnormalities of sexual appetite than they do for its normal manifestations. Die krankhaften Erscheinungen des Geschlechtssinnes. B. Tarnowsky. Berlin, Hirschwald, 1886 This is avowedly an attempt to distinguish the morbid kinds of sexual perversion from the merely vicious, and to enforce the necessity of treating the former not as criminal but as pathological. "The forensic physician discerns corruption, oversatiated sensuality, deep-rooted vice, perverse will, etc., where the clinical observer recognizes with certainty a morbid condition of the patent marked by typical steps of development and termination. Where the one wishes to punish immorality, the other pleads for the necessity of methodical therapeutic treatment." The author is a Russian, whose practice in St petersburg has brought him into close professional relations with the male prsotitutes and habitual paederasts of that capital. He is able therefore to speak wiht authority, on the ground of a quite exceptional knowledge of the moral and physical disturbances connected with sodomy. I cannot but think that the very pecularities of his experience have led him to form incomplete theories. He is too familiar with venal pathics, paedicators, and effemintes who prostitute their bodies in the grossest way, to be able to appreciate the subtler bearings of the problem. Tarnowsky makes two broad divisions of sexual inversion. The first kind is inborn, dependent upon hereditary taint and neuropathic diathesis. He distinguishes three sorts of inborn perversity. In the most marked of its forms it is chronic and persistent, appearing with the earliest dawn of puberty, unmodified by education, attaining to its maximum of intensity in manhood, manifesting in fact all the signs of ordinary sexual inclination. In a second form it is not chronic and persistent, but periodical. The patient is subject to occasional disturbances of the nervous centres, which express themselves in violent and irresistible attacks of the perverted instinct. The third form is epileptical. With regard to acquired sexual inversion, he dwells upon the influence of bad example, thepower of imitation, fashion, corrupt literature, curiosity in persons jaded with normal excesses. Extraordinary details are given conerning the state of schools in Russia; and a particular case is mentioned, in which Tarnowsky himself identified twenty-nine passive paederastis, between the ages of nine and fifteen, in a single school. He had been called int to pronounce upon the causes of an outbreak of syphilis among the pupils. Interesting information is also communicated regarding the prevalence of abnormal vice in St Petersburg, where it appears that bath-men, cab-drivers, caretakers of houses, and artisans are particularly in request. The Russian people show no repugnance for what they call "gentlemen's tricks". Tarnowsky calls attention to ships, garrisons, prisons, as milieux well calcaulated for the development of this vice, when it had once been introduced by someone tainted with it. His view about nations like the Greeks, the Persians, and the Afghans is that, through imitation, fashion, and social toleration, it has become endemic. But all the sorts of abnormality included under the title of acquired [perversion] Tarnowskyregards as criminal. The individual ought, he thinks, to be punished by the law. He naturally includes under this category of acquired perversion the vices of old debauchees. At this point, however, his classification becomes confused; for he shows how senile tendencies to sodomitic passion are frequently the symptom of approaching brain-disease, to which the reason and the constitution of the patient will succumb. French physicians call this "la pédérastie des ramollis". . . . Psychopathia Sexualis, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Conträren Sexualempfindung. Von Dr R. v. Krafft-Ebing. Stuttgart, Enke, 1889 Kraff-Ebing took the problem of sexual inversion up, when it had been already ivnestigated by a number of pioneers and predecessors. They mapped the ground out, and established a kind of psychical chart. We have seen the medical system growing in the works of Moreau and Tarnowsky. If anything, Krafft-Ebing's treatment suffers from too much subdivision and parade of classification. It is only, howeve,r by following the author in his differentiation of the several species that we can form a conception of his general theory, and of the extent of the observations upon which this is based. He starts with (A) Sexual Inversion as an acquired morbid phenomenon. Then he reviews (B) Sexual Inversion as an inborn morbid phenomenon. . . . Krafft-Ebing's theory seems . . . to be that all cases of acquired sexual inversion may be ascribed in thefirst place to morbid predispositions inherited by the patient (Belastung), and in the second place to onanism as the exciting acuse of the latent neuropathic ailment. He excludes the hypothesis of a physiological and healthy deflection from the normal rule of sex. "I think it questionable", he says, "whether the untainted individual (das unbelastete Individuum) is capable of homosexual feelings at all" (p. 73. The adjective homosexual, though ill-compounded of a Greek and a Latin word, is useful, and has been adopted by medical writers on this topic. Unisexual would perhaps be better). The importance of this sentence will be apparent when we come to deal with Krafft-Ebing's account of congenital sexual inversion, which he establishes upon a large induction of cases observed in his own practice. For the present, we have the right to assume that Krafft- Ebing regards sexual inversion, whether "acquired" or "congenital", as a form of inherited neuropathy (Belastung). In cases where it seems to be "acquired", he lays stress upon the habit of self- pollution. . . . Krafft-Ebing assumes that males who have been born with neuropathic ailments of an indefinite kind will masturbate, destroy their virility, and then embark upon a course of vice which offers incalculable dangers, inconceivable difficulties, and inexpressible repugnances. That is the theory. but whence, if not from some overwhelming appetite, do the demoralized victims of self-abuse derive courage for facing the obstacles which a career of sexual inversion carries with it in our civilization? One woudl have thought that such people, if they could not approach a prostitute in a brothel, would have been unable to solicit a healthy man upon the streets. The theory seems to be constructed in order to elude the fact that the persons desginated are driven by a natural impulse into paths far more beset with difficulties than those of normal libertines. . . . It must be observed, in criticizing Krafft-Ebing's theory, that it is so constructed as to render controversy almost impossible. If we point out that a large percentage of males who practise onanism in their adolescence do not acquire sexual inversion, he will answer that these were not tainted with hereditary disease. . . . It is difficult to square Krafft-Ebing's theory with the phenomena presented by schools both public and private in all parts of Europe. In these institutions, not only is masturbation practised to a formidable extent, but it is also everywhere connected with some form of sexual inversion, either passionately Platonic or grossly sensual. Nevertheless we know that few of the boys addicted to these practices remain abnormal after they have begun to frequent women. The same may be said about convict establishments, military prisons, and the like. With such a body of facts string us in the face, it cannot be contended that "only tainted inviduals are capable of homosexual feelings". Where females are absent or forbidden, males turn for sexual gratification to males. And in certain conditions of society sexual inversion may become permanently established, recognized, all but universal. It would be absurd to maintain that all the boy-lovers of ancient Greece owed their instincts to hereditary neuropathy complicated with onanism. The invocation of heredity in problems of this kind is always hazardous. We only thrown the difficult of explanation further back. At what point of the world's history was the morbid taste acquired? If none but tained individuals are capable of homosexual feelings, how did these feelings first come into existence? . . . if the ancestors of the patient must have been afflicted with sexual inversion, in what way did they acquire it, supposing all untainted individuals to be incapable of the feeling? At this moment of history there is probably no individual in Europe hwo has not inherited some portion of a neuropathic strain. If that be granted, everybody is liable to sexual inversion, and the principle of heredity becomes purely theoretical. . . . The problem is too delicate, too complicated, also too natural and simple, to be solved by hereditary disease and self- abuse. When we shift the ground of argument from acquired to inborn sexual inversion, its puzzling character will become still more apparent. We shall hardly be able to resist the conclusion that theories of disease are incompetent to explain the phenomenon in modern Europe. Medical writers abandon the phenomenon in savage races, in classical antiquity, and in the sotadic zone. The strive to isolate it as an abnormal and specifically morbid exception in our civilization. But facts tend to show that it is a recurring impulse of humanity, natural to some people, adopted by others, and in the majority of cases compatible with an otherwise normal and healthy temperament. . . . Ultimately, Krafft-Ebing attacks the problem of what he calls "the innate morbid phenomenon" of sexual inversion. While giving a general description of the subjects of this class, he remarks that the males display a pronounced sexual antipathy for women, and a strongly accentuated sympathy for men. Their reproductive organs are perfectly differentiated on the masculine type; but they desire men instinctively, and are inclined to express their bias by assuming characters of femininity. Women, affected by a like inversion, exhibit corresponding anomalies. Casper, continues Krafft-Ebing, thoroughly diagnosed the phenomenon. Grisinger referred it to hereditary affliction. Westphal defined it as "a congenital inversion of the sexual feelings, together with a consciousness of its morbidity". Ulrichs explained it by the presence of a feminine soul in a male body, and gave the name Urning to its subjects. (Note: Henceforward we may use the word Urning without apology; for however the jurists and men of science repudiate Ulrichs' doctrine, they have adopted his designation for a puzzling and still unclassified member of the human race. A Dr Kaserer of Vienna is said to have invented the term Urning.) Gley suggested that a female brain was combined with masculine glands of sex. Magnan hypothesized a woman's brain in a man's body. Krafft-Ebing asserts that hardly any of these Urnings are conscious of morbidity. They look upon themselves as unfortunate mainly because law and social prejudices stand in the way of their natural indulgence. (Note: This is a hit at Westphal, Krafft-Ebing's predecessor, who laid down the doctrine that Urnings are conscious of their own morbidity. Of course, both authorities are qually right. Approach an Urning with the terrors of social opinion and law, and he will confess his dreadful apprehensions. Approach him from the point of view of science, and he will declare that, within four closed walls, he has had no thought of guilt.) He also takes for proved, together with all the authorities he cites, that the abnormal sexual appetite is constitutional and inborn. . . . At this point he beings to subdivide the subjects of congenital inversion. The first class he constitutes are called by him "Psychical Hermaphrodites". Born with a predominant inclination toward persons of their own sex, they possess rudimentary feelings of a semi-sexual nature for the opposite. . . . In the next place he comes to true homosexual individuals, or Urnings in the strict sense of that phrase. With them there is no rudimentary appetite for the other sex apparent. They present a "grotesque" parallel to normal men and women, inverting or caricaturing natural appetites. The male of this class shrinks from the female, and the female from the male. Each is vehemently attracted from earliest childhood to persons of the same sex. But they, in their turn, have to be subdivided into two sub-species. In the first of these, the sexual life alone is implicate: the persons who compose it, do not differ in any marked or external characteristics from the type of their own sex; their habits and outward appearance remain unchanged. With the second sub-species the case is different. Here the character, the mental constitution, the habits, and the occupations of the subject have been altered by his or her predominant sexual inversion; so that a male addicts himself to a woman's work, assumes female clothes, acquires a shriller key of voice, and expresses the inversion of his sexual instinct in every act and gesture of his daily life. . . . Sexual inversion, in persons of the third main species, has reached its final development. Descending, if we follow Krafft- Ebing's categories, from acquired to innate inversion, dividing the latter into psychopathic hermaphrodites and Urnings, subdividing Urnings into those who retain their masculine habit and those who develop a habit analogous to that of females, we come in this last class to the most striking phenomenon of inverted sex. Here the soul which is doomed to love a man, and is nevertheless imprisoned in a male body, strives to convert that body to feminine uses so entirely that the marks of sex, except in the determined organs of sex, shall be obliterated. . . . The inverted bias given to the sexual appetite, . . . modifies the boy structure of the body, the form of face, the fleshly and muscular integuments, to such an obvious extent that Krafft-Ebing thinks himself justified in placing a separate class of androgynous beings (with their gynandrous correspondents) at the end of the extraordinary process. . . . What is the rational explanation of the facts presented to us by the analysis which I have formulated in this table, cannot as yet be thoroughly determined. We do not know enough about the law of sex in human beings to advance a theory. Krafft-Ebing and writers of his school are at present inclined to refer them all to diseases of the nervous centres, inherited, congenital, excited by early habits of self-abuse. The inadequacy of this method I have already attempted to set forth; and I have also called attention to the fact that it does not sufficiently account for phenomena known to us through history and through everyday experience. Presently we shall be introduced to a theory (that of Ulrichs) which is based upon a somewhat grotesque and metaphysical conception of nature, and which dispenses with the hypothesis of hereditary disease. I am not sure whether this theory, unsound as it may seem to medical specialists, does not square better with ascertained facts than that of inherited disorder in the nervous centres. However that may be, the physicians, as represented by Krafft-Ebing, absolve all subjects of inverted sexuality from crime. They represent them to us as the subjects of ancestral malady. And this alters their position face to face with vulgar error, theological rancour, and the stringent indifference of legislators. A strong claim has been advanced for their treatment henceforth, not as delinquents, but as subjects of congenital depravity in the brain centres, over which they have no adequate control. The fourth medical author, with whom we are about to be occupied, includes sexual inversion in his general survey of human crime, and connects it less with anomalies of the nervous centres than with atavistic reversion to the state of nature and savagery. In the end, it will be seen, he accepts a concordat with the hypothesis of "moral insanity". Cesare Lombroso. Der Verbrecher in Anthropologisher, Aerztlicher und Juristischer Beziehung This famous book, which has contributed no little to a revolution of opinion regarding crime and its punishment in Italy, contains a searching inquiry into the psychological nature, physical peculiarities, habits, and previous history of criminals. It is in fact a study of the criminal temperament. Lombroso deals in the main, as is natural, with murder theft, rape, cruelty, and their allied species. But he includes sexual inversion int he category of crimes, and regards the abnormal appetites as signs of that morbid condition into which he eventually resolves the criminal impulse. Wishing to base his doctrine on a sound foundation, Lombroso begins with what may be termed the embryology of crime. He finds unnatural vices frequent among horses, donkeys, cattle, insects, fowls, dogs, ants. The phenomenon, he says, is usually observable in cases where the male animal has been excluded from intercourse with females. Having established his general position that what we call crimes of violence, unnatural lust, and so forth, exist among the brutes — in fact that most of these crimes form the rule and not the exception in their lives — he passes on to the consideration of the savage man. In following his analysis, I shall confine myself to what he says about abnormal sexual passion. He points out that in New Caledonia the male savages meet together at night in huts for the purpose of promiscuous intercourse. The same occurs in Tahiti, where the practice is placed under the protection of a god. Next he alludes to the ancient Mexicans; and then proceeds to Hellas and Rome, where this phase of savage immorality survived and became a recognized factor in social life. At Tome, he says, the Venus of the sodomites received the title of Castina. Lombroso's treatment of sexual inversion regarded as a survival from prehistoric times is by no means exhaustive. It might be supplemented and confirmed by what we know about the manners of the Celts, as reported by Aristotle (Pol. ii. 6. 5) — Tartars, Persians, Afghans, North American Indians, etc. Diodorus Siculus, writing upon the morals of the Gauls, deserves attention in this respect. It is also singular to find that the Normal marauders of the tenth century carried unnatural vices wherever they appeared in Europe (See Dufour, Histoire de la Prostitution, vol. iii, France, chs 6 and 7). The Abbot of Clairvaux, as quoted by Lombroso, accused them of spreading their brutal habits through society. People accustomed to look upon these vices as a form of corruption in great cities will perhaps be surprised to find them prevalent among nomadic and warlike tribes. But, in addition to survival from half-savage periods of social life, the necessities of warriors thrown together with an insufficiency of women must be considered. I have already suggested that Greek love grew into a custom during the Dorian migration and the conquest of Crete and Peloponnesus by bands of soldiers. . . . Lombroso arrives then at the conclusion that what civilized humanity calls crime and punishes, is the law of nature in brutes, persists as a normal condition among savages, and displays itself in the habits and instincts of children. The moral instinct is therefore slowly elaborated out of crime in the course of generations by whole races, and in the course of infancy and adolescence in the individuals. The habitual criminal, who remains a criminal in his maturity, in whom crime is inborn and ineradicable, who cannot develop a moral sense, he explains at first by atavism. . . . Having started with the hypothesis of atavism, and adopted the term "born criminal", he later on identifies "innate crime" with "moral insanity", and illustrates both by the phenomena of epilepsy. This introduces a certain confusion and incoherence into his speculative system; for he frankly admits that he has only gradually and tardily been led to recognize the identity of what is called crime and what is called moral insanity. Criminal atavism might be defined as the sporadic reversion to savagery in certain individuals. It has nothing logically to connect it with distortion or disease — unless we assume that all our savage ancestors were malformed or diseased, and that the Greeks,in whom one form of Lombroso's criminal atavism became established, were as a nation morally insane. The appearance of structural defects in habitual criminals points less to atavistic reversion than to radical divergence from the normal type of humanity. In like manner the invocation of heredity as a principle involves a similar confusion. Hereditary tain is a thing differing not in degree but in kind from savage atavism prolonged from childhood into manhood. Be this as it may, whether we regard offenders against law and ethic as "born criminals", or as "morally insane", or whether we transcend the distinction implied in these two terms, Lombroso maintains that there is no good in trying to deal with them by punishment. They ought to be treated by life-long sequestration in asylums, and rigidly forbidden to perpetuate the species. That is the conclusion to which the whole of his long argument is carried. He contends that the prevalent juristic conception of crime rests upon ignorance of nature, brute-life, savagery, and the gradual emergence of morality. So radical a revolution in ideas, which gives new meaning to the words sin and conscience, which removes moral responsibility, and which substitutes the anthropologist and the physician for the judge and jury, cannot be carried out even by its fervent apostle, without some want of severe logic. . . . The final word upon Lombroso's book is this: Having started with the natural history of crime, as a prime constituent in nature and humanity, which only becomes crime through the development of social morality, and which survives atavistically in persons ill adapted to their civilized environment, he suddenly turns round and identifies the crime thus analyzed with morbid nerve conditions, malformations, and moral insanity. Logically, it is impossible to effect this coalition of two radically different conceptions. If crime was no crime but nature in the earlier stages, and only appeared as crime under the conditions of advancing culture, its manifestation as a survival in certain individuals ought to be referred to nature, and cannot be relegated to the category of physical or mental disease. Savages are savages, but not lunatics or epileptics. Note to the Foregoing Section At the close of this enquiry into medical theories of sexual inversion, all of which assume that the phenomenon is morbid, it may not be superfluous to append the protest of an Urning against that solution of the problem. I translate it from the original document published by Krafft-Ebing. He says that the writer is "a man of high position in London"; but whether the communication was made in German or in English, does not appear. You have no conception what sustained and difficult struggles we all of us (the thoughtful and refined among us most of all) have to carry on, and how terribly we are forced to suffer under the false opinions which still prevail regarding us and our so-called immorality. Your view that, in most cases, the phenomenon in question has to be ascribed to congenital morbidity, offers perhaps the easiest way of overcoming popular prejudices, and awakening sympathy instead of horror and contempt for us poor "afflicted" creatures. Still, while I believe that this view is the most favourable for us in the present state of things, I am unable in the interest of science to accept the term morbid without qualification, and venture to suggest some further distinctions bearing on the central difficulties of the problem. The phenomenon is certainly anomalous; but the term morbid carries a meaning which seems to me inapplicable to the subject, or at all events to very many cases which have come within my cognizance. I will concede a priori that a far larger proportion of mental disturbance, nervous hypersensibility, etc., can be proved in Urnings that in normal men. But ought this excess of nervous erethism to be referred necessarily to the peculiar nature of the Urning? Is not this the true explanation, in a vast majority of cases, that the Urning, owing to present laws and social prejudices, cannot like other men obtain a simple and easy satisfaction of his inborn sexual desires? To begin with the years of boyhood: an Urning, when he first becomes aware of sexual stirrings in his nature and innocently speaks about them to his comrades, soon finds that he is intelligible. So he wraps himself within his own thoughts. Or should he attempt to tell a teacher or his parents about these feelings, the inclination, which for him is as natural as swimming to a fish, will be treated by them as corrupt and sinful; he is exhorted at any cost to overcome and trample on it. Then there begins in him a hidden conflict, a forcible suppression of the sexual impulse; and in proportion as the natural satisfaction of his craving is denied, fancy works with still more lively efforts, conjuring up those seductive pictures which he would fain expel from his imagination. The more energetic is the youth who has to fight this inner battle, the more seriously must his whole nervous system suffer from it. It is this forcible suppression of an instinct so deeply rooted in our nature, it is this, in my humble opinion, which first originates the morbid symptoms, that may often be observed in Urnings. But such consequences have nothing in themselves to do with the sexual inversion proper to the Urning. Well then: some persons prolong this never-ending inner conflict, and ruin their constitutions in course of time; others arrive eventually at the conviction that an inborn impulse, which exists in them so powerfully, cannot possibly be sinful — so they abandon the impossible task of suppressing it. but just at this point begins in real earnest the Iliad of their sufferings and constant nervous excitations. The normal man, if he looks for means to satisfy his sexual inclinations, knows always where to find that without trouble. Not so the Urning. He sees the men who attract him; but he dares not utter, nay, dares not even let it be perceived, what stirs him. He imagines that he alone of all the people in the world is the subject of emotions so eccentric. Naturally, he cultivates the society of young men, but does not venture to confide in them. So at last he is driven to seek some relief in himself, some makeshift for the satisfaction he cannot obtain. This results in masturbation, probably excessive, with its usual pernicious consequences to health. When, after the lapse of a certain time, his nervous system is gravely compromised, this morbid phenomenon ought not to be ascribed to sexual inversion in itself; far rather we have to regard it as the logical issue of the Urning's position, driven as he is by dominant opinion to forego the gratification which for him is natural and normal, and to betake himself to onanism. But let us now suppose that the Urning has enjoyed the exceptional good fortune of finding upon his path in life a soul who feels the same as he does, or else that he has been early introduced by some initiated friend into the Circles of the Urning-world. In this case, it is possible that he will have escaped many painful conflicts; yet a long series of exciting cares and anxieties attend on every step he takes. He knows indeed now that he is by no means the only individual in the world who harbours these abnormal emotions; he opens his eyes, and marvels to discover how numerous are his comrades in all social spheres and every class of industry; he also soon perceives that Urnings, no less than normal men and women, have developed prostitution, and that male strumpets can be bought for money just as easily as females. Accordingly, there is no longer any difficulty for him in gratifying his sexual impulse. But how differently do things develop themselves in his case! How far less fortunate is he than the normal man! Let us assume the luckiest case that can befall him. The sympathetic friend, for whom he has been sighing all his life, is found. Yet he cannot openly give himself up to this connection, as a young fellow does with the girl he loves. Both of the comrades are continually forced to hide their liaison; their anxiety on this point is incessant; anything like an excessive intimacy, which could arouse suspicion (especially when they are not of the same age, or o not belong to the same class in society), has to be concealed from the external world. In this way, the very commencement of the relation sets a whole chain of exciting incidents in motion; and the dread lest the secret should be betrayed or divined, prevents the unfortunate lover from ever arriving at a simple happiness. Trifling circumstances, which would have no importance for another sort of man, make him tremble: lest suspicious should awake, his secret be discovered, and he become a social outcast, lose his official appointment, be excluded form his profession. Is it conceivable that this incessant anxiety and care should pass over him without a trace, and not react upon his nervous system? Another individual, less lucky, has not found a sympathetic comrade, but has fallen into the hands of some pretty fellow, who at the outset readily responded to his wishes, till he drew the very deepest secret of his nature forth. At that point the subtlest methods of blackmailing begin to be employed. The miserable persecuted wretch, placed between the alternative of paying money down or of becoming socially impossible, losing a valued position, seeing dishonour bursting upon himself and family, pays, and still the more he pays, the greedier becomes the vampire who sucks his life-blood, until at last thee lies nothing else before him except total financial ruin or disgrace. Who will be astonished if the nerves of an individual in this position are not equal to the horrid strain? In some cases the nerves give way altogether: mental alienation sets in; at last the wretch finds in a madhouse that repose which life would not afford him. Others terminate their unendurable situation by the desperate act of suicide.How many unexplained cases of suicide in young men ought to be ascribed to this cause! I do not think I am far wrong when I maintain that at least half of the suicides of young men are due to this one circumstance. Even in cases where no merciless blackmailer persecutes the Urning, but a connection has existed which lasted satisfactorily on both sides, still in these cases even discovery, or the dread of discovery, leads only too often to suicide. How many officers, who have had connection with their subordinates, how many soldiers, who have lived in such relation with a comrade, when they thought they were about to be discovered, have put a bullet through their brains to avoid the coming disgrace! And the same thing might be said about all the other callings in life. In consequence of all this, it seems clear that if, as a matter of fact, mental abnormalities and real disturbances of the intellect are commoner with Urnings than in the case of other men, this does not establish an inevitable connection between the mental eccentricity and the Urning's specific temperament, or prove that the latter causes the former. According to my firm conviction, mental disturbances and morbid symptoms which may be observed in Urnings ought in the large majority of instances not to be referred to their sexual anomaly; the real fact is that they are educed in them by the prevalent false theory of sexual inversion, together with the legislation in force against Urnings and the reigning tone of public opinion. It is only one who has some approximate notion of the mental and moral sufferings, of the anxieties and perturbations, to which an Urning is exposed, who knows the never-ending hypocrisies and concealments h must practise in order to cloak his indwelling inclination, who comprehends the infinite difficulties which oppose the natural satisfaction of his sexual desire — it is only such a one, I say, who is able properly to wonder at the comparative rarity of mental aberrations and nervous ailments in the class of Urnings. The larger proportion of these morbid circumstances would certainly not be developed if the Urning, like the normal man, could obtain a simple and facile gratification of his sexual appetite, and if he were not everlastingly exposed to the torturing anxieties I have attempted to describe. This is powerfully and temperately written. It confirms what I have attempted to establish while criticizing the medical hypothesis; and raises the further question whether the phenomenon of sexual inversion ought not to be approached from the point of view of embryology rather than of psychical pathology. In other words, is not the true Urning to be regarded as a person born with sexual instincts improperly correlated to his sexual organs? This he can be without any inherited or latent morbidity; and the nervous anomalies discovered in him when he falls at last beneath the observation of physicians, may be not the evidence of an originally tainted constitution, but the consequence of unnatural conditions to which he has been exposed from the age of puberty. VI Literature — Historical, Anthropological No one has yet attmpted a complete history of inverted sexuality in all ages and in all races. This would be well worth doing. Materials, though not extremely plentiful, lie to hand in the religious books and codes of ancient nations, in mythology and poetry and literature, in narratives of travel, and the reports of observant explorers. Gibbon once suggested that: "A curious dissertaiton might be formed on the introduction of paederasty after the time of Homer, its progress among the Greeks of Asia and Europe, the vehemence of their passions, and the thin device of virtue and friendship which amused the philosophers of Athens. But", adds the prurient prude, "Scelera ostendi oportet dum puniunter, abscondi flagitia." Two scholars responded to this call. The result is that the chatper on Greek lover has been very fairly written by equally impartial, equally learned, and independent authors, who approached the subject from somewhat different points of view, but who arrived in the main at similar conclusions. The first of these histories is M. H. E. Meier's article on Paederastie inErsch and Gruber's Allgemeine Encyklopädie (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1837). The second is a treatise entitled A Problem in Greek Ethics, composed by an Englishman [i.e. Symonds himself] in English. The anonymous author was not acquainted with Meier's article before he wrote, and only came across it long after he had printed his own essay. This work is extremely rare, ten copies only having been impressed for private use. Enquirers into the psychology and morality of sexual inversion should not fail to study one or other of these treatises. It will surprise many a well-read scholar, when he sees the whole list of Greek authorities and passages collected and coordinated, to find how thoroughly the manners and the literature of that great people were penetrated with paiderastia. The myths and heroic legends of prehistoric Hellas, the educational institutions of the Dorian state, the dialogues of Plato, the history of the Theban army, the biographies of innumerable eminent citizens — lawgivers and thinkers, governors and generals, founders of colonies and philosophers, poets and sculptors — render it impossible to maintain that this passion was either a dgraded vice or a form of inherited neuropathy in the race to whom we owe so much of our intellectual heritage. Having surveyed the picture, we may turn aside to wonder whether modern European nations, imbued with the opinions I have described above in the section on Vulgar Errors, are wise in making Greek literature a staple of the higher education. Their motto is Érasez l'infâme! Here the infamous thing clothes itself like an angel oflight, and raises its forehead unabashed to heaven among the marbleperistyles and olive groves of an unrivalled civilization. Another book, written from a medical point of view, is valuable upon the pathology of sexual inversion and cognate aberrations among the nations of antiquity. It bears the title Geschichte der Lustseuche im Alterthume, and is composed by Dr Julius Rosenbaum (Third edition, Halla a. S., 1882). Rosenbaum attempts to solve the problem of the existence of syphilis and other venereal diseases in the remote past. This enquiry leads him to investigate the whole of Greek and Latin literature in its bearing upon sexual vice. Students will therefore expect from his pages no profound psychological specualtions and no idealistic presentation of an eminently repulsive subject. One of the most interesting chapters of his work is devoted to what Herodotus called noudos phileia among the Scythians, a widespread effemination prevailing in a wild warlike and nomadic race. We have already alluded to Krafft-Ebing's remarks on this disease, which has curious points of resemblance with some of the facts of male prostitution in modern cities. . . . In England an Essay appended to the last volume of Sir Richard Burton's Arabian Nights made a considerable stir upon its first appearance (Arabian Nights, 1885, vol. x. pp. 205—54). The author endeavoured to coordinate a large amount of miscellaneous matter, and to frame a general theory regarding the origin and prevalence of homosexual passions. His erudition, however, is incomplete; and though he possesses a copious store of anthropological details, he is not at the proper point of view for discussing the topic philosophically. For example, he takes for granted that "Pederasty", as he calls it, is everywhere and always what the vulgar think it. He seems to have no notio of the complciated psychology of urnings, revealed to us by their recently published confessions in French and German medical and legal works. Still his views deserve consideration. (Note: Burton's acquaintance with what he called "le Vice" was principally confined to Oriental nations. He started on his enquiries, imbued with vulgar errors; adn he neve weighed the dpsychical theories examined by me in the foregoing section of this Essay. nevertheless, he was led to surmise a crasis of the two sexes in persons subject to sexual inversion. Thus he came to speak of "the third sex". During conversations I had with him less than three months before his death, he told me that he had begun a general history of "le Vice"; and at my suggestion he studied Ulrichs and Krafft-Ebing. It is to be lamented that life failed before he could apply his virile and candid criticism to those theories, and compare them with the facs and observations he had independently collected.) . . . [Burton's outline of "the Sotadic Zone"] is a curious and interesting generalization, though it does not account for what history has transmitted regarding the customs of the Celts, AScythians, Bulgars, Tartars, Normans, and for the acknowledged leniency of modern Slavs to this form of vice. . . . Burton makes no effort to accoutn for the occurrence of this crasis of masculine and feminilne temperament sin the Sotadic Zone at large, and for its sporadic appearance in other regions. Would it not be more philosophical to conjecture that the crasis, if that exists at all, takes place universally; but that the consequences are only tolerate in certian partws of the globe, which he defines as the Sotadic Zone? Ancient Greece and Rome permitted them. Modern Greece and Italy have excluded them to the same extent as Northern European nations. North and South America, before the Conquest, saw no harm in them. Since its colonization by Europeans, they have been discountenanced. The phenomenon cannot therefore begarded as specifically geographical and climatic. Besides, there is one fact mentioned by Burton which ought to make him doubt his geographical theory. He says that, after the conquest of Algiers, the French troops were infected to an enormous extent by the habits they had acuiqred there, and from them it spread so far and wide into civilian society that "the fice may be said to have been democratized in cities and large towns". This surely proves that north of the Sotadic Zone males are neither physically incapable of the acts involved in abnormal passion, nor gifted with an insuperable disgust for them. Law, and the public opinion generated by law and religious teaching, have been deterrent causes in those regions. The problem is therefore not geographical and climatic, but social. Against, may it not be suggested that the absence of "the Vice" among the negroes and negroid races of South Africa, noticed by Burton, is due to their excellent customs of sexual initiation and education at the age of puberty — customs which it is the shame of modern civilization to have left unimitated? However this may be, Burton regards the instinct as natural, not contre nature, and says that its patients "deserve, not prosecution but the pitiful care of the physician and thewstudy of the psychologist". Another distinguished anthropologist, Paola Mantegazza, has devoted special attention to the physiology andpsychology of what he calls "I pervertimenti dell'amore" (Gli amori degli Uomini, Milano, 1886, vol. i. cap. 5). Starting with the vulgar error that all sexual inversion implies the unmentionable act of coition (for which by the way he is severely rebuked by Krafft- Ebing, Psy. Sex., p. 92), he expalins anomalous passions by supposing that the nerves of pleasureable sensation, which ought to be carried to the genital organs, are in some cases carried to the rectum. This malformation makes its subject desire coitum per anum. That an intimate connection exists between the nerves of the reproductive organs and the nerves of the rectum, is known to anatomists and is felt by everybody. Probably some cinaedi are excited voluptuously in the mode suggested. Seneca, in his Epistles, records such cases; and it is difficultin any other way to account for the transports felt by male prostitutes of the Weibling type. Finally, writers upon female prostitution mention women who are incapable of deriving pleasure from any sexual act except aversa venus. Mantegazza's observation deserves to be remembered, and ought to be tested by investigation. But, it is obvious, he pushes the corollary he draws from it, as to the prevalence of sexual inversion, too far. . . . After perusing what physicians, hsitorians, and anthropologists have to say about sexual inversion, there is good reason for us to feel uneasy as to the present condition of our laws. And yet it might be argued that anomalous desires are not always maladies, not always congenital, not always psychical passions. In some cases they must surely be vices deliberately adopted out of lustfulness, wanton curiosity, and seeking after senxual refinements. The difficult question still remains then — how to repress vice, wihout acting unjustly toward the naturally abnormal, the unfortunate, and the irresponsible. I pass now to the polemical writings of a man who maintains that homosexual passions, even in thsir vicious aspects, ought not to be punished except in the same degree and under the same conditions as the normal passions of the majority. VII Literature — Polemical It can hardlyb e said that inverted sexuality received a serious and sympathetic treatment until a German jurist, named Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, began his long warfare agaisnt what he considered to be prejudice and ignorance upon a topic of the greatest moment to himself. A native of Hanover, and writing at first under the assumed name of Numa Numantius, he kept pouring out a series of polemical, analytical, theoretical, and apologetical pamphlets between the years 1864 and 1870. The most important of these works is a lengthy and comprehensive Essay called Memnon. Die Geschlechtsnatur des mannliebenden Urnings. Eine naturwissenschaftliche Darstellung. Schleiz, 1868. Memnon may be used as the textbook of its author's ehtories; but it is also necessary to study earlier and later treatises — Inclusa, Formatrix, Vindex, Ara Spei, Gladius Furens, Incubus, Argonaticus, Prometheus, Araxes, Kritische Pfeile — in order to obtain a complete knowledge of his opinons, and to master the whole mass of information he has brought together. The object of Ulrichs in this miscellaneous writings is twofold. He seeks to establish a theory of sexual inversion upon the basis of natural science, proving that abnormal instincts are inborn and healthy in a considerable percentage of human beings; that they do not owe their origin to bad habits of any kind, to hereditary disease, or to wilful depravity; that they are incapable in the majority of cases of being extirpated or converted into normal channels; and that the men subject to them are neither physically, intellectually, nor morally inferior to normally constituted individuals. Having demonstrated these points to his own satisfaction, and supported his views with a large induction of instances and a respectable show of erudition, he proceeds to argue that the present state of the law in many states of Europe is flagrantly unjust to a class of innocent persons, who may indeed be regarded as unfortunate and inconvenient, but who are guilty of nothing which deserves reprobation and punishment. In this second and polemical branch of his exposition, Ulrichs assumes, for his juristic starting point, that each human being is born with natural rights which legislation ought not to infringe but to protect. He does not attempt to confute the utilitarian theory of jurisprudence, which regards laws as regulations made by the majority in the supposed interests of society. Yet a large amount of his reasoning is designed to invalidate utilitarian arguments in favour of repression, by showing that no social evil ensues in those countries which have placed abnormal sexuality upon the same footing as the normal, and that the toleration of inverted passion threatens no danger to the well-being of nations. After this prelude, an abstract of Ulrichs' theory and his pleading may be given, deduced from the comparative study of his numerous essays. The right key to the solution of the problem is to be found in physiology, in that obscure department of natural science which deals with the evolution of sex. The embryo, as we are now aware, contains an undetermined element of sex during the first months of pregnancy. This is gradually worked up into male and female organs of procreation; and these, when the age of puberty arrives, are generally accompanied by corresponding male and female appetities. That is to say, the man in an immense majority of cases desires the woman, and the woman desires the man. Nature, so to speak, aims at differentiating the undecided foetus into a human being of one or the other sex, the propagation of the species being the main object of life. Still, as Aristotle puts it, and as we observe in many of her operations, "Nature wishes, but has not always the power". . . . Consequently, in respect of physical structure, there comes tolight imperfect individuals, so-called hermaphrodites, whose sexual apparatus is so far undetermined that many a real male has passed a portion of his life under a mistake, has worn female clothes, and has cohabited by preference with men. Likewise, in respect of spiritual nature, there appear males who, notwithstanding their marked masculine organization, feel from the earliest childhood a sexual proclivity toward men, with a corresponding indifference for women. In some of these abnormal, but natural beings, the appetite for men resembles the normal appetite of men for women; in others it resembles the normal appetite of women for men. That is to say, some prefer effeminate males, dressed in feminine clothes and addicted to female occupations. Others prefer powerful adults of an ultra-masculine stamp. A third class manifest their predilection for healthy young men in thebloom of adolescence, between nineteen and twenty. The attitude of such persons toward women also varies. In genuine cases of inborn sexual inversion a positive horror is felt when the woman has to be carnally known; and this horror is of the same sort as that which normal men experience when they think of cohabitation with a male. In others the disinclination does not amount to repugnance; but the abnormal man finds considerable difficulty in stimulating himself to the sexual act with females, and derives a very imperfect satisfaction from the same. A certain type of man, in the last place, seems to be indifferent, desiring males at one time and females at another. In order to gain clearness in his exposition,Ulrichs has invented names for these several species. The so-called hermaphrodite he dismisses with the German designation of Zwitter. Imperfect individuals of this type are not to be considered, because it is well known that the male and female organs are never developed in one and the same body. It is also, as we shall presently discover, an essential part of his theory to regard the problem of inversion psychologically. The normal man he calls Dioning, the abnormal man Urning. Among Urnings, those who prefer effeminate males are christened by the name of Mannling; those who prefer powerful and masculine adults receive the name of Weibling; the Urning who cares for adolescents is styled a Zwischen-Urning. Men who seem to be indiferently attracted by both sexes, he calls Uranodioninge. A genuine Dioning, who, from lack of women, or under the influence of special circumstances, consorts with persons of his own sex, is denominated Uraniaster. A genuine Urning, who has put restraint upon his inborn impulse, who has forced himself to cohabit with women, or has perhaps contracted marriage, is said to be Virilisirt — a virilized Urning. These outlandish names, though seemingly pedantic and superflous, have their technical value, and are necessary to the proper understanding of Ulrichs' system. . . . It will apear in the sequel that, whatever may be though about his psychological hypothesis, the nomenclature he has adopted is useful in discussion, and corresponds to well-defined phenomena, of which we have abundant information. . . . Broadly speaking, the male includes two main species: Dioning and Urning, men with normal, and men with abnormal instincts. What then constitutes the distinction between them? How are we justified in regarding them as radically different? Ulrichs replies that the phenomenon of sexual inversion is to be explained by physiology, and particularly by the evolution of the embryo. Nature fails to complete her work regularly and in every instance. Having succeeded in differentiating a male with full-formed sexual organs from the undecided foetus, she does not always effect the proper differentiation of that portion of the psychical being in which resides the sexual appetite. There remains a female soul in a male body. Anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa, is the formula adopted by Ulrichs; and he quotes a passage from the "Vestives of Creation", which suggests tha the male is a more advanced product of sexual evolution than the female. The male instinct of sex is a more advanced product that the female instinct. Consequently men appear whose body has been differentiated as masculine, but whose sexual instinct has not progressed beyond the feminine stage. Ulrichs' own words ought to be cited upon this fundamental part of his hypothesis, since he does not adopt the opinion that the Urning is a Dioning arrested at a certain point of development; but rather that there is an element of uncertainty attending the simultaneous evolution of physical and psychical factors from the indeterminate ground-stuff. "Sex", says he, "is only an affair of development. Up to a certain stage of embryonic existence all living mammals are hermaphroditic. A certain number of them advance to the condtiion of what I call man (Dioning), others to what I call woman (Dioningin), a third class become what I call Urning (including Urningin). It ensues therefrom that between these three sexes there are no primary, but only secondary differences. And yet true differences, constituting sexual species, exist as facts." Man, Woman, and Urning — the third being either a male or a female in whom we observe a real and inborn, not an acquired or a spurious inversion of appetite — are consequently regarded by him as the three main divisions of humanity viewed from the point of view of sex. The embryonic ground-stuff in the case of each was homologous; but while the two former, Man and Woman, have been normally differentiated, the Urning's sexual instinct, owing to some imperfection in the process of development, does not correspond to his or her sexual organs. The line of division between the sexes, even in adult life, is a subtle one; and the physical structure of men and women yields indubitable signs of their emergence from a common ground- stuff. Perfect men have rudimentary breasts. Perfect women carry a rudimentary penis in their clitoris. The raphé of the scrotum shows where the aperture, common at first to masculine and feminine beings, but afterwards only retained in the female vulva, was closed up to form a male. Other anatomical details of the same sort might be adduced. But these will suffice to make thinking persons reflect upon the mysterious dubiety of what we call sex. That gradual development, which ends in normal differentiation, goes on very slowly. It is only at the age of puberty that a boy distinguishes himself abruptly from a girl, by changing his voice and growing hair on parts of the body where it is not usually found in women. This being so, it is surely not surprising that the sexual appetite should sometimes fail to be normally determined, or in other words should be inverted. Ulrichs maintains that the body of an Urning is masculine, his soul feminine, so far as sex is concerned. Accordingly, though physically unfitted for coition with men, he is imperatively drawn towards them by a natural impulse. Opponents meet him with this objection: "Your position is untenable. Body and soul constitute one inseparable entity." So they do, replies Ulrichs, but the way in which these factors of the person are combined in human beings differs extremely, so I can prove by indisputable facts. The body of the male is visible to the eyes, is mensurable and ponderable, is clearly marked in its specific organs. But what we call his soul — his passions, inclinations, sensibilities, emotional characteristics, sexual desires — eludes the observation of the senses. This second factor, like the first, existed in the undetermined stages of the foetus. And when I find that the soul, this element of instinct and emotion and desire existing in a male, has been directed in its sexual appetite from earliest boyhood towards persons of the male sex, I have the right to qualify it with the attribute of femininity. You assume that soul-sex is indissolubly connected and inevitably derived from body-sex. The facts contradict you, as I can prove by referring to the veracious autobiographies of Urnings and to known phenomena regarding them. Such is the theory of Ulrichs; and though we may not incline to his peculiar mode of explaining the want of harmony between sexual organs and sexual appetite in Urnings, there can be no doubt that in some way or other their eccentric diathesis must be referred to the obscure process of sexual differentiation. Perhaps he antedates the moment at which the aberration sometimes takes its origin, not accounting sufficiently for imperative impressions made on the imagination or the senses of boys during the years which precede puberty. However this may be, the tendency to such inversion is certainly inborn in an extremely large percentage of cases. That can be demonstrated from the reports of persons whose instincts were directed to the male before they knew what sex meant. [Twenty-one cases from Casper-Liman and Krafft-Ebing are briefly summarized, plus a review of Ulrichs' own youth.] . . . That experiences of the kind are very common, every one who has at all conversed with Urnings knows well. From private sources of unquestionable veracity, these may be added. A relates that, before he was eight years old, reveries occurred to him during the day, and dreams at night, of naked sailors. When he began to study Latin and Greek, he dreamed of young gods, and at the age of fourteen, became deeply enamoured of the photograph of the Praxitelian Eros in the Vatican. He had a great dislike for physical contact with girls; and with boys was shy and reserved, indulging in no acts of sense. B says that during his tenderest boyhood, long before the age of puberty, he fell in love with a young shepherd on one of his father's farms, for whom he was so enthusiastic that the man had to be sent to a distant moor. C at the same early age, conceived a violent affection for a footman; D for an officer, who came to stay at his home; E for the bridegroom of his eldest sister. In nearly all the cases here cited, the inverted sexual instinct sprang up spontaneously. Only a few of the autobiographies record seduction by an elder male as the origin of the affection. In none of them was it ever wholly overcome. Only five out of the twenty-seven men married. Twenty declare that, tortured by the sense of their dissimilarity to other males, haunted by shame and fear, they forced themselves to frequent public women soon after the age of puberty. Some found themselves impotent. Others succeeded in accomplishing their object with difficulty, or by means of evoking the images of men on whom their affections were set. All, except one, concur in emphatically asserting the superior attraction which men have always exercised for them over women. Women leave them, if not altogether disgusted, yet cold and indifferent. Men rouse their strongest sympathies and instincts. The one exception just alluded to is what Ulrichs would call an Uranodioning. The others are capable of friendship with women, some even of aesthetic admiration, and the tenderest regard for them, but not of genuine sexual desire. Their case is literally an inversion of the ordinary. Some observations may be made on Ulrichs' theory. It is not recognized by the leading authorities, medical and medico- juristic, in Germany, by writers like Casper-Liman and Krafft- Ebing, that sexual inversion is more often than not innate. So far, without discussing the physiological or metaphysical explanations of this phenomenon, without considering whether Ulrichs is right in his theory of anima muliebris inclusa in corpore virili, or whether heredity, insanity, and similar general conditions are to be held responsible for the fact, it may be taken as admitted on all sides that the sexual diathesis in question is in a very large number of instances congenital. But Ulrichs seems to claim too much for the position he has won. He ignores the frequency of acquired habits. He shuts his eyes to the force of fashion and depravity. He reckons men like Horace and Ovid and Catullus, among the ancients, who were clearly indifferent in their tastes (as indifferent as the modern Turks) to the account of Uranodionings. In one word, he is so enthusiastic for his physiological theory that he overlooks all other aspects of the question. Nevertheless, he has acquired the right to an impartial hearing, while pleading in defence of those who are acknowledged by all investigators of the problem to be the subjects of an inborn misplacement of the sexual appetite. Let us turn then to the consideration of his arguments in favour of freeing Urnings from the terrible legal penalties to which they are at present subject, and, if this were possible, from the no less terrible social condemnation to which they are exposed by the repugnance they engender in the normally constituted majority. Dealing with these exceptions to the kindly race of men and women, these unfortunates who have no family ties knotted by bonds of mutual love, no children to expect, no reciprocity of passion to enjoy, mankind, says Ulrichs, has hitherto acted just in the same way as a herd of deer acts when it drives the sickly and the weakly out to die in solitude, burdened with contumely, and cut off from common sympathy. From the point of view of morality and law, he argues, it does not signify whether we regard the sexual inversion of an Urning as morbid or as natural. He has become what he is, in the dawn and first emergence of emotional existence. You may contend that he derives perverted instincts from his ancestry, that he is the subject of a psychical disorder, that from the cradle he is the subject of a psychical disorder, that from the cradle he is predestined by atavism or disease to misery. I maintain that he is one of nature's sports, a creature healthy and well organized, evolved in her superb indifference to aberrations from the normal type.We need not quarrel over our solutions of the problem. The fact that he is there, among us, and that he constitutes an ever-present factor in our social system, has to be faced. How are we to deal with him? Has society the right to punish individuals sent into the world with homosexual instincts? Putting the question at its lowest point, admitting that these persons are the victims of congenital morbidity, ought they to be treated as criminals? It is established that their appetites, being innate, are to them at least natural and undepraved; the common appetites, being excluded from their sexual scheme, are to them unnatural and abhorrent. Ought not such beings, instead of being hunted down and persecuted by legal bloodhounds, to be regarded with pitying solicitude as among the most unfortunate of human beings, doomed as they are to inextinguishable longings and life-long deprivation of that which is the chief prize of man's existence on this planet, a reciprocated love? As your laws at present stand, you include all cases of sexual inversion under the one denomination of crime. You make exceptions in some special instances, and treat the men involved as lunatics. But the Urning is neither criminal nor insane. He is only less fortunate than you are, through an accident of birth, which is at present obscure to our imperfect science of sexual determination. So far Ulrichs is justified in his pleading. When it has been admitted, that sexual inversion is usually a fact of congenital diathesis, the criminal law stands in no logical relation to the phenomenon. It is monstrous to punish people as wilfully wicked because, having been born with the same organs and the same appetites as their neighbours, they are doomed to suffer under the frightful disability of not being able to use their organs or to gratify their appetites in the ordinary way. But here arises a difficulty, which cannot be ignored, since upon it is based the only valid excuse for the position taken up by society in dealing with this matter. Not all men and women possessed by abnormal sexual desires can claim that these are innate. It is certain that the habits of sodomy are frequently acquired under conditions of exclusion from the company of persons of the other sex — as in public schools, barracks, prisons, convents, ships. In some cases they are deliberately adopted by natures tired of normal sexual pleasure. They may even become fashionable and epidemic.Lastly, it is probable that curiosity and imitation communicate them to otherwise normal individuals at a susceptible moment of development. Therefore society has the right to say: those who are the unfortunate subjects of inborn sexual inversion shall not be allowed to indulge their passions, lest the mischief should spread, and a vicious habit should contaminate our youth. From the utilitarian point of view, society is justified in protecting itself against a minority of exceptional beings whom it regards as pernicious to the general welfare.From any point of view, the majority is strong enough to coerce to inborn instincts and to trample on the anguish of a few unfortunates. But, asks Ulrichs, is this consistent with humanity, is it consistent with the august ideal of impartial equity? Are people, sound in body, vigorous in mind, wholesome in habit, capable of general affections, good servants of the state, trustworthy in all the ordinary relations of life, to be condemned at law as criminals because they cannot feel sexually as the majority feel, because they find some satisfaction for their inborn want in ways which the majority dislike? Seeking a solution to the difficulty stated in the foregoing paragraph, Ulrichs finds it in fact and history. His answer is that if society leaves nature to take her course, with the abnormal as well as with the normal subjects of sexual inclination, society will not suffer. In countries where legal penalties have been removed from inverted sexuality, where this is placed upon the same footing as the normal — in France, Bavaria (?), the Netherlands (?) — no inconvenience has hitherto arisen. (Since Ulrichs left off writing, Italy (by the "Nuovo Codice Penale" of 1889) has adopted the principles of the Code Napoleon, and has placed sexual inversion under the sam legal limitations as the normal sexual instinct.) There has ensued no sudden and flagrant outburst of a depraved habit, no dissemination of a spreading moral poison. On the other hand, in countries where these penalties exist and are enforced — in England, for example, and in the metropolis of England, London — inverted sexuality runs riot, despite of legal prohibitions, despite of threats of prison, dread of exposure, and the intolerable pest of organized chantage [blackmail]. In the eyes of Ulrichs, society is engaged in sitting on a safety-valve, which if nature were allowed to operate unhindered, would do society no harm, but rather good. The majority, he thinks, are not going to become Urnings, for the simple reason that they have not the unhappy constitution of the Urning. Cease to persecute Urnings, accept them at inconsiderable, yet real, factors, in the social commonwealth, leave them to themselves; and you will not be the worse for it, and will also not carry on your conscience the burden of intolerant vindictiveness. Substantiating this position, Ulrichs demonstrates that acquired habits of sexual inversion are almost invariably thrown off by normal natures. Your boys at public schools, he says, behave as though they were Urnings. In the lack of women, at the time when their passions are predominant, they yield themselves up together to mutual indulgences which would bring your laws down with terrible effect upon adults. You are aware of this. You send your sons to Eton and to Harrow, and you know very well what goes on there. Yet you remain untroubled in your minds. And why? Because you feel convinced that they will return to their congenital instincts. When the school, the barrack, the prison,t he ship has been abandoned, the male reverts to the female. This is the truth about Dionings. The large majority of men and women remain normal, simply because they were made normal. They cannot find the satisfaction of their nature in those inverted practices, to which they yielded for a time through want of normal outlet. Society risks little by the occasional caprice of the school, the barrack, the prison, and the ship. Some genuine Urnings may indeed discover their inborn inclination by means of the process to which you subject them. but you are quite right in supposing that a Dioning, though you have forced him to become for a time an Uraniaster, will never in the long run appear as an Urning. The extensive experience which English people possess regarding such matters, owing to the notorious condition of their public schools, goes to confirm Ulrichs' position. Headmasters know how many Uraniasters they have dealt with, what excellent Dionings they become, and how comparatively rare, and yet how incorrigibly steadfast, are the genuine Urnings in their flock. The upshot of this matter is that we are continually forcing our young men into conditions under which, if sexual inversion were an acquired attribute, it would become stereotyped in their natures. Yet it does not do so. Provisionally, because they are shut off from girls, because they find no other outlet for their sex at the moment of its most imperious claims, they turn toward males, and treat their younger school-fellows in ways which would consign an adult to penal servitude. They are Uraniasters by necessity and faute de mieux. But no sooner are they let loose upon the world than the majority revert o normal channels. They pick up women in the streets, and form connections, as the phrase goes. Some undoubtedly, in this fiery furnace through which they have been passed, discover their inborn sexual inversion. Then, when they cannot resist the ply of their proclivity, you condemn them as criminals in their later years. Is that just? Would it not be better to revert from our civilization to the manners of the savage man — to initiate youths into the mysteries of sex, and to give each in his turn the chance of developing a normal instinct by putting him during his time of puberty freely and frankly to the female? If you abhor Urnings, as you surely do, you are at least responsible for their mishap by the extraordinary way in which you bring them up. At all events, when they develop into the eccentric beings which they are, you are the last people in the world who have any right to punish them with legal penalties and social obloquy. Considering the present state of the law in most countries to be inequitable toward a respectable minority of citizens, Ulrichs proposes that Urnings should be placed upon the same footing as other men. That is to say, sexual relations between males and males should not be treated as criminal, unless they be attended with violence (as in the case of rape), or be carried on in such a way as to offend the public sense of decency (in places of general resort or on the open street), or thirdly be entertained between an adult and a boy under age (the protected age to be decided as in the case of girls). What he demands is that when an adult male, freely and of his own consent, complies with the proposals of an adult person of his own sex, and their intercourse takes place with due regard for public decency, neither party shall be liable to prosecution and punishment at law. In fact he would be satisfied with the same conditions as those prevalent in France, and since June 1889 in Italy. If so much were conceded by the majority of normal people to the abnormal minority, continues Ulrichs, an immense amount of misery and furtive vice would be at once abolished. And it is difficult to conceive what evil results would follow. A defender of the present laws of England, Prussia, etc., might indeed reply: "This is opening a free way to the seduction and corruption of young men." But young men are surely at least as capable of defending themselves against seduction and corruption as young women are. Nay, they are far more able, not merely because they are stronger, but because they are not usually weakened by an overpowering sexual instinct on which the seducer plays. Yet the seduction and corruption of young women is tolerated, in spite of the attendant consequences of illegitimate childbirth, and all which that involves. This toleration of the seduction of women by men springs from the assumption that only the normal sexual appetite is natural. The seduction of a man by a male passes for criminal, because the inverted sexual instinct is regarded as unnatural, depraved, and wilfully perverse. On the hypothesis that individuals subject to perverted instincts can suppress them at pleasure or convert them into normal appetite, it is argued that they must be punished. But when the real facts come to be studied, it will be found: first, that these instincts are inborn in Urnings, and are therefore in their case natural; secondly, that the suppression of them is tantamount to life-long abstinence under the constant torture of sexual solicitation; thirdly, that the conversion of them into normal channels is in a large percentage of cases totally impossible, in nearly all where it has been attempted is only partially successful, and where marriage ensues has generally ended in misery for both parties. Ulrichs, it will be noticed, does not distinguish between Urnings, in whom the inversion is admitted to be congenital, and Uraniasters, in whom it has been acquired or deliberately adopted. And it would be very difficult to frame laws which should take separate cognizance of these two classes. The Code Napoleon legalizes the position of both, theoretically at any rate. The English code treats both as criminal, doing thereby, it must be admitted, marked injustice to recognized Urnings, who at the worst are morbid or insane, or sexually deformed, through no fault of their own. In the present state of things, adds Ulrichs, the men who yield their bodies to abnormal lovers, do not merely do so out of compliance, sympathy, or the desire for reasonable reward. Too often they speculate upon the illegality of the connection, and have their main object in the extortion of money by threats of exposure. Thus the very basest of all trades, that of chantage [blackmail], is encouraged by the law. Alter the law, and instead of increasing vice, you will diminish it; for a man who should then meet the advances of an Urning, would do so out of compliance, or, as is the case with female prostitutes, upon the expectation of a reasonable gain. The temptation to ply a disgraceful profession with the object of extorting money would be removed. Moreover, as regards individuals alike abnormally constituted, voluntary and mutually satisfying relations, free from degrading risks, and possibly permanent, might be formed between responsible agents. Finally, if it be feared that the removal of legal disabilities would turn the whole male population into Urnings, consider whether London is now so much purer in this respect than Paris? One serious object to recognizing and tolerating sexual inversion has always been that it tends to check the population. This was a sound political and social argument in the time of moses, when a small and militant tribe needed to multiply to the full extent of its procreative capacity. It is by no means so valid in our age, when the habitable portions of the globe are rapidly becoming overcrowded. Moreover, we must bear in mind, that society, under the existing order, sanctions female prostitution, whereby men and women, the normally procreative, are sterilized to an indefinite extent. Logic, in these circumstances, renders it inequitable and ridiculous to deny a sterile exercise of sex to abnormal men and women, who are by instinct and congenital diathesis non-procreative. As the result of these considerations, Ulrichs concludes that there is no real ground for the persecution of Urnings except such as may be found in the repugnance felt by the vast numerical majority for an insignificant minority. The majority encourages matrimony, condones seduction, sanctions prostitution, legalizes divorce, in the interest of its own sexual proclivities. It makes temporary or permanent unions illegal for the minority whose inversion of instinct it abhors. And this persecution, int he popular mind at any rate, is justified, like many other inequitable acts of prejudice or ignorance, by theological assumptions and the so-called mandates of revelation. In the next place it is objected that inverted sexuality is demoralizing to the manhood of a nation, that it degrades the dignity of man, and that it is incapable of moral elevation. Each of these points may be taken separately. They are all of them at once and together contradicted by the history of ancient Greece. There the most warlike sections of the race, the Dorians of Crete and Sparta, and the Thebans, organized the love of male for male because of the social and military advantages they found in it. Their annals abound in eminent instances of heroic enthusiasm, patriotic devotion, and high living, inspired by homosexual passion. The fighting peoples of the world, Celts in ancient story, Normans, Turks, Afghans,Albanians, Tartars, have been distinguished by the frequency among them of what popular prejudice regards as an effeminate vice. With regard to the dignity of man, is there, asks Ulrichs, anything more degrading to humanity in sexual acts performed between male and male than in similar acts performed between male and female? In a certain sense all sex has an element of grossness which inspires repugnance. The gods, says Swinburne, "have strewed one marriage-bed with tears and fire, / For extreme loathing and supreme desire." It would not be easy to maintain that a curate begetting his fourteenth baby on the body of a worn-out wife is a more elevating object of mental contemplation than Harmodius in the embrace of Aristogeiton, or that a young man sleeping with a prostitute picked up in the Haymarket is cleaner than his brother sleeping with a soldier picked up in the Park. Much of this talk about the dignity of man, says ulrichs, proceeds from a vulgar misconception as to the nature of sexual desire. People assume that Urnings seek their pleasure only or mainly in an act of unmentionable indecency. The exact opposite, he assures them, is the truth. The act in question is no commoner between men and men than it is between men and women. Ulrichs, upon this point, may be suspected, perhaps, as an untrustworthy witness. his testimony, however, is confirmed by Krafft-Ebing, who, as we have seen, has studied sexual inversion long and minutely from the point of view of psychical pathology. "As regards the nature of their sexual gratification", he writes, "it must be established at the outset that the majority of them are contented with reciprocal embraces; the act commonly ascribed to them they generally abhor as much as normal men do; and, inasmuch as they always prefer adults, they are in no sense specially dangerous to boys" (Psych. Sex., p. 108. I have condensed the sense of four short paragraphs, to translate which in full would have involved a disagreeable use of medical language). This author proceeds to draw a distinction between Urnings, in whom sexual inversion is congenital, and old debauchees or half-idiotic individuals, who are in the habit of misusing boys. The vulgar have confounded two different classes; and everybody who studies the psychology of Urnings is aware that this involves a grave injustice to the latter. "But, after all", continues the objector, "you cannot show that inverted sexuality is capable of any moral elevation." Without appealing to antiquity, the records of which confute this objection overwhelmingly, one might refer to the numerous passages in Ulrichs' writings where he relates the fidelity, loyalty, self-sacrifice, and romantic enthusiasm which frequently accompany such loves, and raise them above baseness. But, since here again he may be considered a suspicious witness, it will suffice, as before, to translate a brief passage from Krafft-Ebing. "The Urning loves, idolizes his friend, quite as much as the normal man loves and idolizes his girl. He is capable of making for him the greatest sacrifice. He suffers the pangs of unhappy, often unreturned affection; feels jealousy, mourns under the fear of his friend's infidelity." When the time comes for speaking about Walt Whitman's treatment of this topic, it will appear that the passion of a man for his comrade has been idealized in fact and deed, as well as in poetry. For the present it is enough to remark that a kind of love, however spontaneous and powerful, which is scouted, despised, tabooed, banned, punished, relegated to holes and corners, cannot be expected to show its best side to the world. The sense of sin and crime and danger, the humiliation and repression and distress, to which the unfortunate pariahs o inverted sexuality are daily and hourly exposed, must inevitably deteriorate the nobler elements in their emotion. Give abnormal love the same chance as normal love, subject it to the wholesome control of public opinion, allow it to be self- respecting, draw it from dark slums into the light of day, strike off its chains and set it free — and I am confident, says Ulrichs, that it will exhibit analogous virtues, checkered of course by analogous vices, to those with which you are familiar in the mutual love of male and female. The slave has of necessity a slavish soul. The way to elevate is to emancipate him. "All that may be true", replies the objector: "it is even possible that society will take the chard case of your Urnings into consideration, and listen to their bitter cry. But, in the meanwhile, supposing these inverted instincts to be inborn, supposing them to be irrepressible and inconvertible,supposing them to be less dirty and nasty than they are commonly considered, is it not the plain duty of the individual to suppress them, so long as the law of his country condemns them?" No, rejoins Ulrichs, a thousand times no! It is only the ignorant antipathy of the majority which renders such law as you speak of possible. Go to the best books of medical jurisprudence, go to the best authorities on psychical deviations from the normal type. You will find that these support me in my main contention. These, though hostile in their sentiments and chilled by natural repugnance, have a respect for science, and they agree with me in saying that the Urning came into this world an Urning, and must remain till the end of his life an Urning still. To deal with him according to your code is no less monstrous than if you were to punish the colour-blind, of the deaf and dumb, or albinos, or crooked-back cripples. "Very well", answers the objector: "But I will quote the words of an eloquent living writer, and appeal to your generous instincts and your patriotism. Professor Dowden observes that 'self-surrender is at times sternly enjoined, and if the egoistic desires are brought into conflict with social duties, the individual life and joy within us, at whatever cost of personal suffering, must be sacrificed to the just claims of our fellows' (Studies in Literature, p. 119). What have you to say to that?" In the first place, replies Ulrichs, I demur in this case to the phrases egoistic desires, social duties, just claims of our fellows. I maintain that in trying to rehabilitate men of my own stamp and to justify their natural right to toleration, I am not egoistic. It is begging the question to stigmatize the inborn desire as selfish. The social duties of which you speak are not duties, but compliances to law framed in blindness and prejudice. The claims of our fellows, to which you appeal, are not just, but cruelly inequitous. My insurgence against all these things makes me act indeed as an innovator; and I may be condemned, as a consequence of my rashness, to persecution, exile, defamation, proscription. But let me remind you that Christ was crucified, and that he is now regarded as a benefactor. "Stop", breaks in the objector: "We need not bring most sacred names into this discussion. I admit that innovators have done the greatest service to society. But you have not proved that you are working for the salvation of humanity at large. Would it not be better to remain quiet, and to sacrifice your life and joy, the life and joy of an avowed minority, for the sake of the immense majority who cannot tolerate you, and who dread your innovation? The Catholic priesthood is vowed to celibacy; and unquestionably there are some adult men in that order who have trampled out the imperious appetite of the male for the female. What they do for the sake of their vow will not you accomplish, when you have so much of good to gain, of evil to escape?" What good, what evil? rejoins Ulrichs. You are again begging the question; and now you are making appeals to my selfishness, my personal desire for tranquillity, my wish to avoid persecution and shame. I have taken no vow of celibacy. If I have taken any vow at all, it is to fight for the rights of an innocent, harmless, downtrodden group of outraged personalities. The cross of a Crusade is sewn upon the sleeve of my right arm. To expect from me and from my fellows the renouncement voluntarily undertaken by a Catholic priest is an absurdity, when we join no order, have no faith to uphold, no ecclesiastical system to support. We maintain that we have the right to exist after the fashion in which nature made us. And if we cannot alter your laws, we shall go on breaking them. You may condemn us to infamy, exile, prison — as your formerly burned witches. You may degrade our emotional instincts and drive us into vice and misery. But you will not eradicate inverted sexuality. Expel nature with a fork, and you know what happens. "That is enough", says the objector: "We had better close this conversation. I am sorry for you, sorry that you will not yield to sense and force. The Urning must be punished." VIII Literature — Idealistic To speak of Walt Whitman at all in connection with Ulrichs and sexual inversion seems paradoxical. At the outset it must be definitely stated that he has nothing to do with anomalous, abnormal, vicious, or diseased forms of the emotion which males entertain for males. Yet no man i the modern world has expressed so strong a conviction that "manly attachment", "athletic love", "the high towering love of comrades", is a main factor in human life, a virtue upon which society will have to rest, and a passion equal in its permanence and intensity to sexual affection. He assumes, without raising the question, that the love of man for man coexists with the love of man for woman in one and the same individual. . . . Neuropathical Urnings are not hinted at in any passage of his works. As his friend and commentator Mr Burroughs puts it: "The sentiment is primitive, athletic, taking form in all manner of large and homely out-of-door images, and springs, as anyone may see, directly from the heart and experience of the poet." This being so, Whitman never suggests that comradeship may occasion the development of physical desires. But then he does not in set terms condemn these desires, or warn his disciples against them. To a Western boy he says: If you be not silently selected by lovers, and do not silently select lovers, Of what use is it that you seek to become eleve of mine? Like Plato, in the Phaedrus, Whitman describes an enthusiastic type of masculine emotion, leaving its private details to the moral sense and special inclination of the person concerned. (Note: In this relation it is curious to note what one of Casper-Liman's correspondents says about the morals of North America (Handbuch der Gerichtlichen Medicin, vol i. p. 173). "Half a year after myr eturn I went to North America, to try my fortune. there the unnatural vice in question is more ordinary than it is here; and I was able to indulge my passions with less fear of punishment or persecution. The American's tastes in this matter resemble my own; and I discovered, int he United States, that I was always immediately recognized as a member of the confraternity." The date of this man's visit to America was the year 1871—72. He had just returned from serving as a volunteer in the great Franco-German war of 1870—71.) The language of "Calamus" (that section of Leaves of Grass which is devoted to the gospel of comradeship) has a passionate glow, a warmth of emotional tone, beyond anything to which the modern world is used in the celebration of the love of friends. It recalls to our mind the early Greek enthusiasm — that fellowship in arms which flourished among Dorian tribes, and made a chivalry for prehistoric Hellas. Nor does the poem himself appear to be unconscious that there are dangers and difficulties involved in the highly-pitched emotions he is praising. The whole tenor of two mysterious compositions, entitled "Whoever you are, Holding me now in Hand", and "Trickle, Drops", suggests an underlying sense of spiritual conflict. The following poem, again, is sufficiently significant and typical to call for literal transcription: Earth, my likeness! Though you look so impressive, ample and spheric here, I now suspect that is not all; I now suspect there is something fierce in you, eligible to burst forth; For an athlete is enamoured of me — and I of him;, But toward him there is something fierce and terrible in me, eligible to burst forth, I dare not tell it in words — not even in these songs. The reality of Whitman's feeling, the intense delight which he derives from the personal presence and physical contact of a beloved man, find expression in "A Glimpse", "Recorders ages hence", "When I heard at the Close of Day", "I saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak growing", "Long I thought that Knowledge alone would content me" (Not included in the Complete Poems and Prose. It will be found in Leaves of Grass, Boston, 1860—61), "O Tan- faced Prairie-Boy", and "Vigil Strange I kept on the Field one Night" (the two last are from Drum-Taps). It is clear then that, in his treatment of comradeship, or the impassioned love of man for man, Whitman has struck a keynote, to the emotional intensity of which the modern world is unaccustomed. . . . To remove all doubt about Whitman's own intentions when he composed "Calamus", and promulgated his doctrine of impassioned comradeship, I wrote to him, frankly posing the questions which perplexed my mind. The answer I received, dated Camden, New Jersey, USA, August 19, 1890, and which he permits me to make use of, puts the matter beyond all debate, and confirms the conclusions to which I had been led by criticism. He writes as follows: About the questions on "Calamus", etc., they quite daze me. "Leaves of Grass" is only to be rightly construed by and within its own atmosphere and essential character — all its pages and pieces so coming strictly under. That the Calamus part has even allowed the possibility of such construction as mentioned is terrible. I am fain to hope the pages themselves are not to be even mentioned for such gratuitous and quite at the time undreamed and unwished possibility of morbid inferences — which are disavowed by me and seem damnable. No one who knows anything about Walt Whitman will for a moment doubt his candour and sincerity. There the man who wrote "Calamus", and preached the gospel of comradeship, entertains feelings at least as hostile to sexual inversion as any law-abiding humdrum Anglo-Saxon could desire. It is obvious that he has not even taken the phenomena of abnormal instinct into account. Else he must have foreseen that, human nature being what it is, we cannot expect to eliminate all sensual alloy from emotions raised to a high pitch of passionate intensity, and that permanent elements within the midst of our society will imperil the absolute purity of the ideal he attempts to establish. (Note: While these sheets were going through the press, I communicated Whitman's reply to a judicious friend, whose remarks upon it express my own opinion more clearly and succinctly than I have done above: "I do not feel that this answer throws light on the really interesting question; does the sentiment of 'Calamus' represent, in its own way, the ideal which we should aim at impressing on passionate affections between men, as certainly liable to take other objectionable forms? Is there sufficient affinity between the actual and the ideal for this to be practicable? That is what I have never felt sure about when we have discussed these matters. But I do not feel that my doubts have been resolved in any negative direction by Walt Whitman.") These considerations do not, however, affect the spiritual nature of that ideal. After acknowledging, what Whitman has omitted to perceive, that there are inevitable points of contact between sexual inversion and his doctrine of comradeship, the question now remains whether he has not suggested the way whereby abnormal instincts may be moralized and raised to higher value. In other words, are those instincts provided in "Calamus" with the means of their salvation from the filth and mire of brutal appetite? It is difficult to answer this question; for the issue involved is nothing less momentous that the possibility of evoking a new chivalrous enthusiasm, analogous to that of primitive Hellenic society, from emotions which are at present classified among the turpitudes of human nature. . . . Whitman does not conceive of comradeship as a merely personal possession, delightful to the friends it links in bonds of amity. He regards it essentially as a social and political virtue. This human emotion is destined to cement society and to render commonwealths inviolable. Reading some of his poems, we are carried back to ancient Greece — to Plato's Symposium, to Philip gazing on the Sacred Band of Thebans after the fight at Chaeronea. I dream'd in a dream, I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth; I dream'd that was the new City of Friends; Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love — it led the rest; It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city, And in all their looks and words. ("I hear it was charged against me") . . . In the company of Walt Whitman we are very far away from Gibbon and Carlier, from Tardieux and Casper-Liman, from Krafft- Ebing and Ulrichs. What indeed has this "superb friendship, exalté, previously unknown", which "waits, and has been always waiting, latent in all men", that "something fierce in me, eligible to burst forth", "ethereal comradeship", "the last athletic reality" — what has all this in common with the painful topic of the preceding sections of my Essay? It has this in common with it. Whitman recognizes among the sacred emotions and social virtues, destined to regenerate political life and to cement nations, an intense, jealous, throbbing, sensitive, expectant love of man for man: a love which years in absence, droops under the sense of neglect, revives at the return of the beloved: a love that finds honest delight in han-touch, meeting lips, hours of privacy, close personal contact. He proclaims this love to be not only a daily fact in the present, but also a saving and ennobling aspiration. While he expressly repudiates, disowns, and brands as "damnable" all "morbid inferences" which may be drawn by malevolence or vicious cunning from his doctrine, he is prepared to extend the gospel of comradeship to the whole human race. He expects Democracy, the new social and political medium, the new religious ideal of mankind, to develop and extend "that fervid comradeship", and by its means to counterbalance and to spiritualize what is vulgar and materialistic in the modern world. "Democracy", he maintains, "infers such loving comradeship, as its most inevitable twin or counterpart, without which it will be incomplete, in vain, and incapable of perpetuating itself." (These prose passages are taken from Democratic Vistas.) If this be not a dream, if he is right in believing that "threads of manly friendship, fond and loving, pure and sweet, strong and life-long, carried to degrees hitherto unknown", will penetrate the organism of society, "not only giving tone to individual character, and making it unprecedentedly emotional, muscular, heroic, and refined, but having deepest relations to general politics" — then we are perhaps justified in foreseeing here the advent of an enthusiasm which shall rehabilitate those outcast instincts, by giving them a spiritual atmosphere, an environment of recognized and healthy emotions, wherein to expand at liberty and purge away the grossness and the madness of their pariahdom? This prospect, like all ideals, until they are realized in experience, may seem fantastically visionary. Moreover, the substance of human nature is so mixed that it would perhaps be fanatical to expect from Whitman's chivalry of "adhesiveness" a more immaculate purity than was attained by the medieval chivalry of "amativeness". Still that medieval chivalry, the great emotional product of feudalism, though it fell short of its own aspiration, bequeathed incalculable good to modern society by refining and clarifying the crudest of male appetites. In like manner, the democratic chivalry, announced by Whitman, may be destined to absorb, control, and elevate those darker, more mysterious, apparently abnormal appetites, which we have seen to be widely diffused and ineradicable in the groundwork of human nature. Returning from the dream, the vision of a future possibility, it will at any rate be conceded that Whitman has founded comradeship, the enthusiasm which binds man to man in fervent love, upon a natural basis. Eliminating classical associations of corruption, ignoring the perplexed questions of a guilty passion doomed by law and popular antipathy to failure, he begins anew with sound and primitive humanity. There he discovers "a superb friendship, exalté, previously unknown". He perceives that "it waits, and has been always waiting, latent in all men". His method of treatment, fearless and uncowed by any thought of evil, his touch upon the matter, chaste and wholesome and aspiring, reveal the possibility of restoring in all innocence to human life a portion of its alienated or unclaimed moral birthright. The aberrations we have been discussing in this treatise are perhaps the morbid symptoms of suppression, of hypertrophy, of ignorant misregulation, in a genuine emotion capable of being raised to good by sympathetic treatment. It were well to close upon this note. The half, as the Greeks said, is more than the whole; and the time has not yet come to raise the question whether the love of man for man shall be elevated through a hitherto unapprehended chivalry to nobler powers, even as the barbarous love of man for woman once was. This question at the present moment is deficient in actuality. The world cannot be invited to entertain it. * * * X Suggestions on the Subject of Sexual Inversion in Relation to Law and Education I. The laws in force against what are called unnatural offences derived from an edict of Justinian, AD 538. The Emperor treated these offences as criminal, on the ground that they brought plagues, famines, earthquakes, and the destruction of whole cities, together with their inhabitants, upon the nations who tolerated them. II. A belief that sexual inversion is a crime against God, nature, and the state pervades all subsequent legislation on the subject. This belief rests on (1) theological conceptions derived form the Scriptures; (2) a dread of decreasing the population; (3) the antipathy of the majority for the tastes of the minority; (4) the vulgar error that antiphysical desires are invariably voluntary, and the result either of inordinate lust or of satiated appetites. III. Scientific investigation has proved in recent years that a very large proportion of persons in whom abnormal sexual inclinations are manifested, possess them from their earliest childhood, that they cannot divert them into normal channels, and that they are powerless to get rid of them. In these cases then, legislation is interfering with the liberty of individuals, under a certain misconception regarding the nature of their offence. IV. Those who support the present laws are therefore bound to prove that the coercion, punishment, and defamation of such persons are justified either (1) by any injury which these persons suffer in health of body or mind, or (2) by any serious danger arising from them to the social organism. V. Experience, confirmed by scientific observation, proves that the temperate indulgence of abnormal sexuality is no more injurious to the individual than a similar indulgence of normal sexuality. VI. In the present state of over-population, it is not to be apprehended that a small minority of men exercising sterile and abnormal sexual inclinations should seriously injure society by limiting the increase of the human race. VII. Legislation does not interfere with various forms of sterile intercourse between men and women: (1) prostitution, (2) cohabitation in marriage during the period of pregnancy, (3) artificial precautions against impregnation, and (4) some abnormal modes of congress with the consent of the female. It is therefore in an illogical position, when it interferes with the action of those who are naturally sterile, on the ground of maintaining the numerical standard of the population. VIII. The danger that unnatural vices, if tolerated by the law, would increase until whole nations acquired them, does not seem to be formidable. The position of women in our civilization renders sexual relations among us occidentals different from those of any country — ancient Greece and Rome, modern Turkey and Persia — where antiphysical habits have hitherto become endemic. IX. In modern France, since the promulgation of the Code Napoleon, sexual inversion has been tolerated under the same restrictions as normal sexuality. That is to say, violence and outrages to public decency are punished, and minors are protected, but adults are allowed to dispose as they like of their own persons. The experience of nearly a century shows that in France, where sexual inversion is not criminal per se, there has been no extension of it through society. Competent observers, like agents of police, declare that London, in spite of our penal legislation, is no less notorious for abnormal vice than Paris. X. Italy, by the Penal Code of 1889, adopted the principles of the Code Napoleon on this point. It would be interesting to know what led to this alteration of the Italian law. But it cannot be supposed that the results of Code Napoleon in France were not fully considered. XI. The severity of the English statutes render them almost incapable of being put in force. In consequence of this the law is not unfrequently evaded, and crimes are winked at. (Note: It may not be superfluous to recapitulate the main points of English legislation on this topic. (1) Sodomy is a felony, defined as the carnal knowledge (per anum) of any man or of any woman by a male person; punishable with penal servitude for life as a maximum, for ten years as a minimum. (2) The attempt to commit sodomy is punishable with ten years' penal servitude as a maximum. (3) The commission, in public or in private, by any male person with another male person, of "any act of gross indecency", is punishable with two years imprisonment and hard labour.) XII. At the same time our laws encourage blackmailing upon false accusation; and the presumed evasion of their execution places from time to time a vile weapon in the hands of unscrupulous politicians, to attack the Government in office. Examples: the Dublin Castle Scandals of 1884, the Cleveland Street Scandals of 1889. XIII. Those who hold that our penal laws are required by the interests of society, must turn their attention to the higher education. This still rests on the study of the Greek and Latin classics, a literature impregnated with paiderastia. It is carried on at public schools, where young men are kept apart from females, and where homosexual vices are frequent. The best minds of our youth are therefore exposed to the influences of a paiderastic literature, at the same time that they acquire the knowledge and experience of unnatural practices. Nor is any trouble taken to correct these adverse influences by physiological instruction in the laws of sex. XIV. The points suggested for consideration are whether England is still justified in restricting the freedom of adult persons, and rendering certain abnormal forms of sexuality criminal, by any real dangers to society: after it has been shown (1) that abnormal inclinations are congenital, natural, and ineradicable in a large percentage of individuals; (2) that we tolerate sterile intercourse of various types between the two sexes; (3) that our legislation has not suppressed the immorality in question; (4) that the operation of the Code Napoleon for nearly a century has not increased this immorality in France; (5) that Italy, with the experience of the code Napoleon to guide her, adopted its principles in 1889; (6) that the English penalties are rarely inflicted to their full extent; (7) that their existence encourages blackmailing, and their non- enforcement gives occasion for base political agitation; (8) that our higher education is in open contradiction to the spirit of our laws. Books Consulted No name or date. A Problem in Greek Ethics. "Ten Copies printed for the Author's Use.' [i.e. by Symonds himself] Bastian. Der Mensch in der Geschichte. Leipzig: Wigand, 1860. Burton, Sir R. F. Arabian Nights. Vol. 10. Benares, 1885. Carlier, F. Les deux Prostitutions. Paris: Dentu, 1889. Casper, J. L. Klinische Novellen. Berlin: Hirschwald, 1863. Casper, J. L. and Liman, Carl. Handbuch der Gerichtlichen Medicin. Berlin: Hirschwald, 1889. Coffignon, A. La Corruption à Paris. Paris: La Librairie Illustrée. 7th edition. No date. Dufour, P. Histoire de la Prostitution. Eight vols. Bruxelles: Rozey, 1861. Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Chapter xliv. Krafft-Ebing, R. von. Psychopathia Sexualis. Stuttgart: Enke, 1889. Levy-München. Die Männliche Sterilität. Berlin: Henser, 1889. Lombroso, Cesare. Der Verbrecher in Anthropologischer, Aerztlicher, und Juristischer Beziehung. Hamburg: Richter, 1887. Mantegazza, P. Gli Amori degli Uomini. Milano, 1886. Meier, M. H. F. Paederastie. Ersch und Gruber's Allgemeine Encyclopädie. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1837. Moreau, P. Des Aberrations du Sense Génétique. Paris: Asselin et Houzeau, 1887. Nuovo Codice Penale per il Regno d'Italia. Rosenbaum, J. Geschichte der Lustseuche im Alterthume. Halle a. S.: H. W. Schmidt, 1882. Spencer, Herbert. Sociological Tables. Tardieu, A. Attentats aux Moeurs. Paris: Baillière, 1878. Tarnowsky, B. Die krankhaften Erscheinungen des Geslechtssines. Berlin: Hirschwald, 1886. (Ulrichs, K. H.) Numa Numantius. Formatrix. Anthrop. Studien über urnische Liebe. Leipzig, 1865. (Ulrichs, K. H.) Numa Numantius. Vindex. Social-juristische Studien über mannmännliche Geschlechtsliebe. Leipzig, 1864. (Ulrichs, K. H.) Numa Numantius. Vindicta. Kampf für Freiheit u. s. w. Leipzig, 1865. (Ulrichs, K. H.) Numa Numantius. Ara Spei. Moralphil. und Socialphil. Studien über urnische Liebe. Leipzig, 1865. Ulrichs, K. H. Gladius Furens. Das Naturräthsel der Urningsliebe. Kassel: Württenberger, 1868. Ulrichs, K. H. Memnon. Die Geschlechtsnatur des mannliebenden Urnings. Schleiz: H. Heyn, 1868. Ulrichs, K. H. Incubus. Urningsliebe und Blutgier. Leipzig: A. Serbe, 1869. Ulrichs, K. H. Argonauticus. Zastrow und die Urninge. Leipzig: A. Serbe, 1869. Ulrichs, K. H. Prometheus. Beträge zur Erforschung des Nturräthsels des Uranismus. Leipzig: Serbe, 1870. Ulrichs, K. H. Araxes. Ruf nach Befreiung der Urningsnatur vom Strafgesetz. Schleiz: Heyn, 1870. Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass, in Complete Poems and Prose. 1889—1890. Whitman, Walt. Democratic Vistas. Return to Symonds Table of Contents Return to Gay History and Literature